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Latest SCSI Drive Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the ask-your-parents-about-it dept.

Sivar writes "StorageReview got their hands on a Maxtor Atlas 10K V, the first SCSI hard drive in more than two years to double capacity. Considering how quickly storage was improving just a few years ago, and other news like Intel's cancellation of the 4GHz Pentium IV despite AMD's lead you have to wonder if the traditional predictions of the end of Moore's Observation are actually beginning to come true."

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Large caches by Twillerror · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article claims that hard drives are starting to clammer for 16 mb caches. It seems odd that no one has come out with a standard cache expansion kit.

    A mother board with an ATA chipset that could plug in older dirt cheap SRAM or even newer DDR or better. Imagine a 4 gig cache of SRAM attached to your harddrives. A machine left on for a while would start to smoke.

    I have some really highend SCSI raid controllers that allow 256 megs of cache...I wonder why there is a product out there to add cache to an existing ATA system. Obviously cost is an issue, but it seems like this sort of thing would give a big bang for the buck. High end games will pay anything for a 5% perf increase.

    1. Re:Large caches by BeerCat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The more serious response...

      It seems odd that no one has come out with a standard cache expansion kit.

      What about a cache expansion kit that is a small daughterboard that can take multiple RAM type designs (SIMM / DIMM / SO-DIMM etc), and which then plugs into the drive's cache socket. This would mean that all the old RAM that you had to remove to upgrade your machine could be put to good use. Even though it would not be as fast as the RAM in main use, it would still be around 1000 times faster than the HD itself. OK, so trying to integrate 30-pin SIMMs would probably be a bit silly (especially with a limit of something like 8Mb), but anything from about 168-pin would do.

      --
      "She's furniture with a pulse"
  2. SCSI vs IDE, price points, and NOT MOORE'S LAW by shoppa · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Forget Moore's law.

    SCSI drive capacities have stayed where they were while IDE drive capacities got bigger because for real-world RAID arrays (where SCSI drives are used) capacity isn't the goal. It's speed. If you need 1 Terabyte of really fast RAID storage it makes far more sense to put in 15 73gbyte3 SCSI drives (10K RPM, 15K RPM) than it does to use 4 300 GB IDE drives (7.2K RPM).

    In the meantime IDE drives have begun to be used in RAID arrays, but usually where capacity matters and not performance. Admittedly the lines have blurred, especially for network-connected storage arrays where ethernet pipes are the limit and you cannot really tell the difference between a good IDE array and a regular SCSI array.