Singing the Praise of SCSI

[Mat]

Yesterday I had to dig out an older G4, as another machine of mine doesn't boot anymore (seems to be the PSU, …). It is a G4 AGP with a Sonnettech 1,2 GHz. And, I completely forgot that it has an ATTO SCSI controler installed. As we are discussing SSDs a lot recently in the other threads, I wanted to know how fast these 2 attached 15k disks are, as the entire computer feels quite snappy, even for OS 9.

The 15k drives are delivering 88MB/s at read, and 55MB/s writing! That is incredible!

Only the Quantum Atlas III is damn loud, but the Seagate 15k is not annoying at all. As the ATTO controller is 64 Bit, it may make sense to think about some software raid, to increase the speed even more. Anyhow, I will stay with SCSI at this machine and not care about SSDs. The disks are working well like at the first day, even if they have not been used for years now. The machine is still rocking, and it is more than 20 years old now.

[IIO]

if you put a sonnet encore into an AGP, will it run at the same clock speed than in a quicksilver?

[Mat]

I never tried it in a Quicksilver. But it seems that it doesn't matter. I searched within the manual, no informations. I also tried to find other sources, but no hints to any difference connected to the systembus – I assume that is why you asked?

[IIO]

if it ran slower i wouldnt recommend the 1.2 mhz for an AGP/blue

but when i think about it my assumption is probably nonsense. there were such cards/combinations, but surely not the sonnet ST - the sonnet supports what is says as long as the bus speed is 100 - it uses jumpers to set to bus speeds.

edit: i have looked it up. only in macs with bus speed 66 they will run slower. and, fun fact: in a quicksilver the 1.3 ghz card only runs at 1,266

[Jubadub]

15k, as in, RPM? I hear those are damn fast for spinning drive standards. If it works for you, and you already have it, then why not? (Just make sure to be prepaped with backups if suddenly one day they all die because of age or wear.)

If the day those drives die comes, then upgrading it to an SSD afterwards would work out perfectly. No need to rush it if the current results satisfy your needs and whims.

[refinery]

i used to work in the datacenter industry. before SSDs were available in large capacities, 15k HD spinners were the de facto standard for higher capacity performance storage. Ive seen multi-rack storage clusters with hundreds and hundreds of them just chugging away, and sucking down a massive amount of electricity while doing so. You still see a fair amount of it now in applications dont require massive IO counts. That is an area that could never compete with SSDs and even back then for high IOPS setups servers would utilize specialized cache and RAID cards which in a way were a sort of proto-solid state storage, albeit in smaller capacities.

i'll say one thing though - its a lot quieter in the datacenters these days... those 15k drives are damn loud. Or at least, when there's a bunch of them that is. 

[IIO]

the 73gb velociraptor 2,5" HD was a defacto standard in these days.

when i started recording audio we used 10,000 rpm drives. it mainly helped with the seek time, the throughput was faster than SCSI 1 & 2 anyway.