Too upset with scsi performance...

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08-24-2006, 07:03 AM
cooleye

Too upset with scsi performance...

Well for a long time (maybe starting from 1995 when I had my first computer 486@33), scsi is a shining word which means fast, reliable, less cpu ocupation and etc. For the next 10 years, I had DIYed 4 rigs for myself and each time I just do not have the chance to obtain the scsi since I think desktop's PCI bus dramastically reduced scsi's performance.

This time, I finally got the chance, and I spend extra $$ to get the Asus p5wdg2 ws pro in order to use the pci-x 133 scsi card. Then I spend $400 for the lsi 2032R kit + fuji MAW 10k drive.

When I saw the Lsi scsi bios poped up in the boot time, I felt quite released - "my ten years dream fulfilled today " , that is really what I thought at that time. However this kind of happyness just did not last long !!!:(

I used sisofte sndra and get my fuji speed at 83MB/s , still happy at that time, but soon I was astonished to find that my sata2 segate 320G has a speed of 71MB/s !!! My god, isn't that a sarcastic number ? My $$$ scsi setup only beats my $97 sata2 by a margin ???:confused:

I tried HD Tach right away and got even more depressing result, my fuji has Average read at 72MB/s with cpu 2%, but my segate has 64.9MB/s with cpu 1% ???!!! Evenmore, my segate has burst speed 258.6MB/s which beats my fuju at 233MB/s !!! Now is it a joke that scsi has less cpu utilization, fast burst rate ?

Now I am in a deep sorrow, it turns out that scsi is a fantacy and I do not think those 15K drive will have much difference.... Maybe in old days they are superior to IDE, but it seems now they are just meaning "EXPENSIVE". Maybe I am wrong, but that is what i got from the benchmark. These days I am just asking myself , do I spend $400 for my rig's performance or just fulfilled my beautiful dream ? :confused:
08-25-2006, 01:43 AM
nn_step

1) SCSI is only about absolute best
2) sounds like you need to get a much better RAID card
08-25-2006, 03:12 AM
cooleye

Quote:

Originally Posted by nn_step

2) sounds like you need to get a much better RAID card

Do you mean this LSI2032 is a piece of crap ? This card does suport raid 0/1 though, however I did not intend to use raid setup this time since I only use a relative small mid-tower case, two disks are the maximum I could put to keep good case vantilation.

That is why I use one scsi for my system and one sats2 for storage. I searched scsi hard drive performance from the internet, and it seems my results from LSI2032 is not surprising. SCSI drives's performance seems no longer in the absolute leading position... Notice I only compare that with a normal sata2 , not with those crazy fast WD raptors . :(
08-25-2006, 03:18 AM
kiwi

You have to look at access times too, your Seagate will have 12-14ms whereas scsi 10K will have around 8ms

Run PCmark05 and you will see the difference :)
08-25-2006, 03:27 AM
cooleye

Quote:

Originally Posted by kiwi

You have to look at access times too, your Seagate will have 12-14ms whereas scsi 10K will have around 8ms

Run PCmark05 and you will see the difference :)

OK , You are right here, the only place that my fuji beats segate obviously is the random access time, which is 7.8ms vs 13.2ms. But that will NOT do much difference in scientifical computing, vedio editing and gaming... My rig is only workstaion , not file server .:(

Maybe I should get a raptor instead of this scsi setup in the view of the performance / $, but still I fulfilled my ten - year dream. :)
08-25-2006, 04:06 AM
nn_step

Quote:

Originally Posted by cooleye

Do you mean this LSI2032 is a piece of crap ? This card does suport raid 0/1 though, however I did not intend to use raid setup this time since I only use a relative small mid-tower case, two disks are the maximum I could put to keep good case vantilation.

That is why I use one scsi for my system and one sats2 for storage. I searched scsi hard drive performance from the internet, and it seems my results from LSI2032 is not surprising. SCSI drives's performance seems no longer in the absolute leading position... Notice I only compare that with a normal sata2 , not with those crazy fast WD raptors . :(

well let us veiw SCSI this way:
They run virtually forever
They at the moment of creation are the absolute BEST on Earth [not always by a large amount though]
When you need the absolute best, they are the thing to get.
NOT IN ANY MEANS COST EFFECTIVE
08-25-2006, 10:22 AM
SamHughe

Have you ever used the search button and checked what other ppl's been saying about SCSI? No? Well...too bad you spent all these money then.

Even for the last week there were two or three threads about SCSI performance.

One thing for sure, speedwise you can't get any advantage of having SCSI with only 1 slowass drive on your raid card. Put 6, 8 or, what the hell, 16 of these suckers on a chain and only then you'll see who's the boss. What did you say?...Too expensive? Well..if you did your homework, you'd have known about all of these.
08-25-2006, 10:31 AM
itznfb

i have a server with a raid 1 config on scsi320 drives that reach ~85MBps. i have a similar server in raid 10 config on scsi320 that reach ~120MBps. then i have another server in raid 10config on SAS that hits over 200MBps across two sets, and over 400MBps across 4 sets.

then of course theres the md1000 with 12GBps of throughput :)

scsi will definatly give you a boost but you need to spend the money on the right card. the sas interface is much faster btw.
08-25-2006, 10:38 AM
uOpt

The age of the drives also plays a big role.

A small next-to-current generation 10,000 SCSI drives is run over by a 150 GB Raptor.

There is progress other than just expressed in rpm and seek time.
08-25-2006, 10:46 AM
cooleye

Well I did see ppl talking about scsi raid compared to wd raptor raid, but I did not do homework for the comparison of a single 10k vs the single sata 7200rpm one. They are the same slowass vs slowass in different interface, however I took it for grant that scsi will easily beat sata, which turns out to be not true .
6 or 8 in raid 0 has never occued in my mind, even if I do that setup, I think the PCI-X 133 speed will be the bottle neck and greatly reduce the benefit , and might be the same as 4 raptor's raid 0 ?
08-25-2006, 10:52 AM
sierra_bound

The board you're using has jumpers to maximize PCI-X performance. Have you played with those yet?
08-25-2006, 10:52 AM
cooleye

Quote:

Originally Posted by itznfb

i have a server with a raid 1 config on scsi320 drives that reach ~85MBps. i have a similar server in raid 10 config on scsi320 that reach ~120MBps. then i have another server in raid 10config on SAS that hits over 200MBps across two sets, and over 400MBps across 4 sets.

then of course theres the md1000 with 12GBps of throughput :)

scsi will definatly give you a boost but you need to spend the money on the right card. the sas interface is much faster btw.

Yeah, I have seen the similar figures in other benchmark, raid 1 is just a mirror setup which should be the same as a single one in the view of the performance. That is why i think my result is reasonable and the card is functioning well.

SAS is for sure the better tech and more promising, but I did not consider that since my main purpose is for worksation (computing, editing and a bit game). I just feel a bit surprised that scsi is not as what I thought before when compared to sata. I do agree that I haven't done enogh homework.:(
08-25-2006, 10:54 AM
cooleye

Quote:

Originally Posted by sierra_bound

The board you're using has jumpers to maximize PCI-X performance. Have you played with those yet?

Yes, I set it to 133. As I said, my benchmark result seems to be reasonable when looking at other's results through web.
08-27-2006, 08:30 AM
ncage1974

SCSI Vs Ide/Sata

Dude SCSI is not meant for workstation performance. Where you get performance with SCSI is when you put it in a server situation. Like set up a heavy web server and compare scsi and IDE/Sata. Scsi will blow it away. Scsi just works so good at stuff at things that need ultra low access times. With a lot of server applications access times are even more important than throughput. If you have multiple threads on web server and each thread is needing a different file on the disk which is what happenes a lot of time. Same thing happens with databases.
08-27-2006, 08:58 AM
Order

15k SAS/SCSI is the way to go for workstation and gaming systems if you really want the highest performance. 10k SCSI will still be bested by a Raptor in non-server situations.
08-28-2006, 05:40 AM
uOpt

Quote:

Originally Posted by sierra_bound

The board you're using has jumpers to maximize PCI-X performance. Have you played with those yet?

At the throughput levels we are talking about that is useless fiddling. The throughput of any 64 bit 100+MHz PCI bus will not hold the drives back.

The fact is that older SCSI drives are much slower than newest drives even for the same rpm rating. "15K rpm SCSI" is no no means a guarantee for getting the best speed.

You have to look at actual test results and reviews.

Just buying "10K rpm" or "15K rpm" is like buying a CPU by the MHz and ending up with a decaf CPU like a Celeron.
08-28-2006, 06:10 AM
cooleye

[QUOTE=uOpt .

Just buying "10K rpm" or "15K rpm" is like buying a CPU by the MHz and ending up with a decaf CPU like a Celeron.[/QUOTE]

That is surprising, I thought 10k rpm and 15k rpm should not have much difference from different brands ...
08-28-2006, 07:49 AM
uOpt

I'm not talking brand, I talk age.
08-28-2006, 08:01 AM
itznfb

bottom line is... if you want the best performance and money is no question.... then you maximize an SAS array across 4 or more drives. for a direct attached storage solution you would have something like 15 drives in this array. obviously this isn't an option for home users considering this would cost thousands of dollars. even the SAS solution accross 4 drives would be several thousand dollars. so the next best thing is SATAII accross 4 or more drives. if you can find a decent RAID controller with onboard hardware RAID, a RAID 0 arrray (seagate SATA2 16mb cache) accross 8 drives would totally own.
08-30-2006, 03:36 AM
pitata

Well, you could just buy cheap 7200.10 with ICH7 to get great burst rate.

My setup :
2*250G 7200.10 16M with Intel Matrix Storage Manager with Write Back Cache enable. raid 0 & 1

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/6079/2gburstzs8.jpg

Obviously the WBC is a way to artificially inflate the synthetic benchmarks, but its still cool with a >2GB/s burst rate. :D
08-30-2006, 04:13 AM
oohms

Scsi is only useful to the average pc user/gamer if you can get it CHEAP... my 18 gig 15k drive cost me less than $40, and i got the card for free... it runs really good as a windows partition
I would not even bother buying any more drives as it really would not be worth it to get 150 gig 15k drives just so on the rare occasion that i game, they would load 1/2 sec faster
08-30-2006, 04:59 PM
cooleye

Quote:

Originally Posted by oohms

Scsi is only useful to the average pc user/gamer if you can get it CHEAP... my 18 gig 15k drive cost me less than $40, and i got the card for free... it runs really good as a windows partition
I would not even bother buying any more drives as it really would not be worth it to get 150 gig 15k drives just so on the rare occasion that i game, they would load 1/2 sec faster

I totally agree with you now. :)
But 15K 18 g ? I thought the smalleat is 36 g for 15k .....
08-31-2006, 06:11 AM
alfaunits

A minor note - if you check StorageReview's DB you'll notice Raptors rape SCSI by a very large margin in DriveMark benches.