scsi connections(is it worth it)

[z]

I had a bad experience with scsi when i mistakenly bought a scsi crw when everything else was ide. I have heard scsi harddrives would be a good way to go but im traumatized from my last experience. plus i heard ide technology is 'catching up' with scsi as far as speed. should I be bold and jump in it??

[bubba freaktree]

scsi all the way. your problem was that you tried to put a scsi device on an ide bus... completely incompatible.

ide is catching up on single direction transfer. but for simlutaneous read write (can someone say "overdubbing") scsi still kicks ide's ass.

use ide for backup drives to archive files.

[+Erik.+]

most people around here are running fast ide drives for their audio tracks. SCSI is still a better format but not necessarily for audio, where even the most modest IDE drive can handle over 100 tracks.

other things regarding SCSi are extra noise and heat which is not good for the DAW system.

SCSI systems are more seen in large server systems these days too.

For your DAW IDE is fine.

[Robert D]

Yes, I can say overdubbing. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif But really, this might be a good point if someone had 48 tracks playing back, and then wanted to overdub another 24 at once, but when the heck do you do that? Almost all overdubbs are a track or two at a time, especially at the track count where any 7200 RPM IDE drive is starting to work hard.
No argument that SCSI is a superior interface, but it is absolutely unnecessary for audio work these days, and as Eric points out, there are tradeoffs aside from cost.
Regards, RD

[This message has been edited by Robert D (edited 01-07-2003).]

[bubba freaktree]

it depends on what everyone's budget is. to me, a few hundred dollars more for a nice scsi drive setup is not the end of the world (although I always have my eye on budgets).

with 24/96k, scsi gives you the extra breathing room. espcially since scsi is geared toward working in raid-o arrays. for those who don't know what raid-o is, this means you can record to two scsi drives at once and the file is split between the two drives. this *exactly* doubles the performance. It's like having a 20,00rpm drive....now that's balls! ide is starting to come out with some raid array stuff. but scsi is totally proven in this area. and scsi goes to 10,000rpm while ide tops out at 7200rpm.

i am actually very carefully building a pc-based daw right now. here is my current plan:

use a 40gig 7200 rpm ide drive as the os/programs drive, unpartitioned. (it's good to not have an overly large system/apps drive).

use a pair of 43 gig 10,000rpm scsi drives in a raid-o array on a separate pci controller car buss, partitioned at approx 10 gig sizes. these drives are for tracking/overdubbing and mixing.

have a second interenal ide 7200 rpm drive, about 80gigs to stream sample data from (giga sampler type stuff, drum loops) and to dump new loops, samples and whatevers to. kind of like my kitchen trash can.

have an external 120 gig usb 2.0 drive to back up files to. and probably another drive to back up the backup. kind of like the big dumpster you can throw your old couch into.

yes, that's 5 going on 6 drives. you can
can easily have 12 scsi drives if you wanted to/needed to. ide stars to get tricky going past two internal drives. sometimes even two ide's can be a troubleshooting pita.

on the other extreme, you could just get a 60gig 7200rpm drive as your only drive, but that seems so chincy. and if that drive fails, your whole ship goes down!

now I might try to "go cheap" and put my 120gig backup ide(s) inside my cpu for a while and see if I can get by without spending the extra $600 for a proper scsi setup (i have nothing against ide). actually I'll probably start out with one ide drive, then quickly grow to 2 and build my system outward from there. this way my hardware expansion troubleshooting is mortgated over time. pay and pray as I go.....


Originally posted by Robert D:
Yes, I can say overdubbing. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif But really, this might be a good point if someone had 48 tracks playing back, and then wanted to overdub another 24 at once, but when the heck do you do that? Almost all overdubbs are a track or two at a time, especially at the track count where any 7200 RPM IDE drive is starting to work hard.
No argument that SCSI is a superior interface, but it is absolutely unnecessary for audio work these days, and as Eric points out, there are tradeoffs aside from cost.
Regards, RD

[This message has been edited by Robert D (edited 01-07-2003).]

[knowdoubt]

RAID-0 is a pretty bad Idea in general. From a purely mathmatical standpoint, drives in RAID-0 array increase your chance of drive failure & total data loss across both drives by a factor of 2 & 4 drives by a factor 4 since the failure of one drive in the array causes loss of all data on all the drives. That coupled with the fact that it's unnecessary for achieving adequate performance & it makes little sense. It may be acceptable if used only for work in progress, such as tracking mixing or processing heavy workloads like video while makeing sure the original files are still backed up on another drive or media, but all work should be emediately saved to onother single drive. Sure , the single drive can fail also & loose data, but it's a simple science of playing the odds & the more drives linked in a striped array... the worse the odds.

RAID-1 (mirroring) however has the exact opposite effect of increased data security.

[Davros]

Or, Raid 0+1 or even 1+0 if you want to get redundancy and performance ;-)

At the end of the day, the IDE vs SCSI debate is pretty old. The Western Digital 8mb buffer drives put in a fine performance and will perform admirably for peoples DAW requirements.

SCSI buys you the ability to have heavy IOPS totally independant to CPU OPS, meaning that I can be hammering away reading/writing data and not be slowed down elsewhere on my machine. Now, IDE doesn't do so well when it comes to multiple drives. Features such as tagged queuing, async reads, etc. make SCSI far superior.

Add in 15k RPM drives, amazingly fast seek times, and a greater reliability factor (most SCSI drives are designed for Servers, not desktops and will last a lot longer). So yes, SCSI is 'better', but it's also more expensive.

Does that matter for you? Well, if you're running an I/O heavy server, then yes it does. Otherwise, IDE is probably just fine.

As always, everything is IMHO.

Cheers

[Robert D]

Bubba - Sounds like a killer system your putting together, you certainly will never see a disk bottleneck.
B.T.W., Raid for IDE is not just coming out, it's been out for awhile and works well. I have a RAID controller at the ready, but so far it's still sitting on the shelf in it's shrink wrapped box, as I haven't had the need for the speed, and without the need, it makes little sense to incur the extra risk. If and when I use it, I'll probably run it in RAID 0+1. But one must keep in mind that mirroring is no replacement for backups, as an inadvertant file delete, or a virus will effect all drives.
What are you doing about computer noise? All those SCSI drives and the fans to dissipate the heat are gonna sound like a Lear jet spinnin up.
Regards, RD

[bubba freaktree]

i hope i don't sound like a "snot" here, but....

every self-respecting studio owner-operator (be it professional or hobbyist) should have all of their cpu's in a completely separate "enclosure" from where the person(s) work. this takes on three forms:
1) a fairly large "box" meant to house computers for isolation purposes
2) a closet with the door shut
3) another room somewhere I know some studio operators who drill holes in their walls, and put all of their cpu's in their "office/accounting" room with all of their phone/faxes/printers, and then run a wire to the control room. If these two rooms are adjacent to one another, the cable run can be incredibly short, like 3 feet or even less if you're getting creative for some reason.

There are soooooooo many cable extenders and infrared gadgets, that it's a crime not to do this. you really only need your monitor and mouse/keyboard in the "control" room.

visually, it's great too. you can keep the majority of your "crap" wires and power boxes and printers and cable modems and cd burners and techincal manuals and backed-up cd'rs and uninterruptable power supplies and whatever else in your frankenstein room, and then live-large in your nice-clean mixing room.

this is the completely pro thing to do. for those of you without "big analog studio" experience. the standard that developed was to put your two inch, 24 track Studer machines in a small, separate room from your $750,000 96 input SSL 900J mixing console.

so go ahead, sacrifice your stupid closet, and get that "million-dollar" studio feeling.

It's way better than dorking-out with sticking your cpu in your ikea desk with the "specially designed area" for your computer. yeah, those are so great when you have to access the back of your computer, and pull your whole desk away from the wall. and they do "such a gooooood job" of keeping cpu noise away from you.... yeah right!

so get out of loser-land and put your cpu's in a separate closet/room where they belong. class dismissed.

[bubba freaktree]

sorry, 9000j (mis-type)

[Davros]

My studio machine is so noisy it sounds like I have some sort of Jet turbine firing up.

I haven't quite worked out how to keep the noise down. Other people whack their machines in cupboards, but alas, no cupboards available for me!

There are so-called 'stealth' fans available that spin at a lower RPM, so are therefore quieter. Downside is, then everything else such as hard disks is even more apparent (and anyone with Seagate 10krpm cheetahs knows what i'm talking about here).

[raindog]

I got my DAW setup in a downstairs granny flat under my house. In the bedroom I have my computer box, mouse, monitor and keyboard plus my midi controller keyboard. I have all this hooked up to a $20.00 router box that lets me hook up another set of monitor, mouse and keyboard which I have on really long leads set up in the "kitchen"-I just have to flick a switch before I leave the bedroom and close the door behind me. The leads run under a door and I just pack a towel around this-then I'm set to start recording.

The genius of this setup is that it allows me to "track" from another room to the computer AND has the added advantage of being able to set up in the shower stall or the toilet when I'm chasing a bit of natural reverb all whilst making a cup of coffee and a toasted cheese sandwiches.

Am currently playing around with a re-tractable stand for monitor, mouse keyboard that will hang from the ceiling (a la hospital bed TV) so that I can do do my mixdowns in horizontal mode http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif