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Thread: hard drives

  1. #1
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    Post hard drives

    Hello. Can i ask you guys the different hard drives used. ATA, SCSI, etc. and whats the best hard drives right now. Thx.
    which comes first my nick or my attitude....

  2. #2
    SCSI

  3. #3
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    whats the difference between an SCSI and an ATA? Whats the advantage of having an SCSI drive?
    which comes first my nick or my attitude....

  4. #4
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    Originally posted by jhoeffrey
    whats the difference between an SCSI and an ATA? Whats the advantage of having an SCSI drive?
    well SCSI (pronounced 'scuzzi') is the faster type of hard drive, and are best for network boxes and image editing, etc. SCSI drives are also normally expensive.

    ATA drives are slightly slower than SCSI ones and are better for home computers where the HD speed isnt all that important to the rest of the system, ATA drives tend to be very cheap.

    as well as this which drive you want depends on what type your motherboard supports (unless you buy an extension card)

    on the whole, if you want a quick drive and you got the money to pay for it then get scsi otherwise get an ATA one.
    There\'s no sense in being Pessimistic...it would never work anyway.

  5. #5
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    IDE is what your hard drive and CD are ussully on. You can only hook up to about four, unless you get new mother boards that have 4 IDE contollers built on that will support up to 8 drive. Or get and expansion card.

    SCSI allows you to connect up to 7 drives on one card or contoller. SCSI also allows you to have internal and external drive, scanners, printer, CDROMS, etc. etc. Depending on what kind of SCSI you have depends on speed. You can have SCSI-1, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, Wide SCSI, and differential.
    If I remember right SCSI-3 should be the fastest. You would want SCSI on your servers, and some higher performance machines.

    Originally posted by hogfly
    scsi can go up to ultra wide scsi 4. or SCSI 160 (which is the transfer rate from the drive 160mb/sec)

    currently IDE is the standard in PC's or low end servers, it can be called many things ATA, UDMA, EIDE etc.... each channel can hold 2 devices. the standard setup is to have 2 ide channels on a computer. for a max of 4 devices. some of the newer boards have 4 IDE channels for a max of 8 drives,cdroms,dvd's etc....
    SCSi channels are much more complex. you generally need a SCSi controller onboard or PCI card(PCI is better) each card can have up to 15 devices per channel. some cards have 3 channels. It is generally reserved for servers or high end workstations where speed and performance are critical.

    the current max for IDE is ATA100 which transfers at 100 MB/sec and spins at 7200 RPMs and it is cheap, so it is much more affordable. whereas scsi is expensive and can transfer up to 160MB/sec.
    [gloworange]\"A hacker is someone who has a passion for technology, someone who is possessed by a desire to figure out how things work.\" [/gloworange]

  6. #6
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    There's actually some debate over the benfits of scsi over ide, have a look here - http://www.pcmech.com/showdoc/79/

  7. #7
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    As an aside, it also depends a bit on which OS you are running.
    If you are running some type of Windows, I doubt you would notice much difference. One thing to note is that if you do get an ATA drive for a Windows system, then check that that you also instal the appropriate drivers if appropriate. For example if you are using an Intel chip set, then there is a specific set of drivers for Windows98 etc. Don't know about other versions of Windows, but on a PC I have which still has Windows98 on it, installing the drivers significantly increased the transfer speed. I'm guessing here, but it looks like it was running as ATA-66, whereas with the drivers it came up to its full ATA-100 capacity.
    Mind you, this isn't my specialist area, so I could be talking a load of ....

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