Help me spend some money!

[artboy]

The old box is getting parted out, and I need some new parts!

I use my PC mostly for graphics stuff--print design, web design, rendering, some video, some audio, lots of multitasking... I'm already set up with the mobo/proc/ram/video, so there's no dually option in the budget this year. I'm looking more for advice in regards to SCSI...

I dual-boot Win2k/Mandrake 7.2 from two ide drives right now, and use a separate drive for data. I'd like to emulate the same kind of setup, but using SCSI. Should I go with one big SCSI drive, and partition it for Windoze, Linux, and a generic "data" partition? Should I maybe save a little money, recycle an IDE drive (or two) for booting, and get a smaller SCSI drive for the data? I'll be adding a CD (or DVD) and CDRW to the SCSI chain also.

Am I killing some of the performance benefits of SCSI by going with a mixed setup (ide boot drives, scsi data drive)? Or does it not matter? Cost is something I'd like to keep in mind, obviously I've got cash to spend if I'm going SCSI, but I don't want it to get outlandish (i.e. I'm not blowing my budget on a 73gig SCSI drive). I've always been working from the assumption that your boot drive can be the slower of the two, if you're keeping all your data on a faster drive, then most of the read/writes are confined to the "good" drive. Therefore, I should be spending my money on a faster, bigger data drive? Given the situation and what I'm considering purchasing (SCSI card, drive, CD, CDRW) how would you set it up?

[atl2ptown]

Well it depends. Im assuming that your board is IDE-controlled, so you'll need a scsi card in order to run scsi devices. You can find scsi cdrw's for very cheap any more. Scsi hard drives are also cheap, but you are still running certain IDE devices. If you truely want to become scsi, then buy a scsi motherboard, and an IDE adapter card for you generic cd-rom and floppy devices, then you can run the rest of your devices from a scsi controller and save much cpu processing power. This is my opinion; other people may say otherwise.

[artboy]

Sorry, wasn't specific enough about the motherboard; yes, it's ide-based. It's an Iwill KK-266 + Tbird 1ghz + PC133 + Geforce 2. So I will need to buy a scsi controller card for the devices. In hindsight, I should have gone for a mobo with scsi onboard already, but that's the problem when you're buying parts a few months apart.

So...you're saying it's best if I'm basing everything except my floppy drive off the scsi controller? Buy a bigger scsi drive and just partition out what I need?

[ph34r]

That's what I'd do, and keep your ide drives around for mass storage - cd images, pr0n, mp3's, whatever.

[Dagda]

I would buy a SCSI card and hard drive but leave the cd-rom ide. If you buy an Ultra 160 HD and an 80mb/s Cd-rom and put them on the same chain, the HD becomes 80 not 160 so you will lose performance :(


"Only man would burn the last tree in the forest to stay warm for one more night." - Jack London

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[artboy]

Just when I thought things were going to get easier to figure out!

So what if I buy a dual-channel scsi card (a la the Tekram DC-390 series)? Couldn't I hook the 160 hard drive up to one channel, terminate it, and hook the cd & cdrw up on the other channel, terminate them, and not have to worry about losing any performance? Or am I thinking of a $400 scsi card instead of one that costs $180? My budget is hovering around $800 for a scsi setup, that includes the card, hard drive, cd and cdrw. So basically I'm in the 36gig range for scsi hard drives with that kind of budget.

I'd use a big IDE drive to store data, but that seems to me to sort of defeat the purpose of going to scsi in the first place--I'm moving, copying and saving files onto my "data" drive (for the most part, except when I'm installing/uninstalling), so wouldn't I want the data drive (or partition) to be the fastest one?

[Dagda]

Yea a dual channel card would work just fine. Then you could get the best performance out of both devices. :D