SCSI Drives - Taking your machine to the next level?

[Nitro]

About 6 months ago I built a pretty kick ass machine and now im feeling like I want more. Has anyone here tried running 15k RPM SCSI drives in thier setup?

My current setup is:

Core 2 Quad 6700
Extreme Striker MB
8800 Ultra OC 768 Video Card
2 Raptor X Drives in Raid 0 - I've added a few drives and removed raid since my initial setup
4 GB Memory
Dual Boot Xp Pro & Vista Ultimate


The things im thinking about doing are bumping to 8GB system memory, Vista 64bit, dual 9 series video cards, and possibly a SCSI interface card and a few 15K RPM drives.

Has anyone here built a gaming rig with SCSI drives before, are there any drawbacks? I know you get a smaller drive and they cost alot but damn the numbers look impressive:

Model
Brand Western Digital
Series Raptor X
Model WD1500AHFD
Performance
Interface SATA 1.5Gb/s
Capacity 150GB
RPM 10,000 RPM
Cache 16MB
Average Seek Time 4.6ms
Average Write Time 5.2ms
Average Latency 2.99ms

VS

Model
Brand Fujitsu
Model MAX3036NP
Performance
Interface SCSI Ultra320 68pin
Capacity 36.7GB
RPM 15,000 RPM
Cache 8MB
Average Seek Time 3.3ms
Average Write Time 3.8ms
Average Latency 2ms

[Xzin]

Why are you building one massive machine when 4 low end ones with enough memory, a decent CPU and even just an 8600 video card plus a central fast machine would most likely beat anything you can throw at it on the market today? All SCSI is going to do is slightly reduce load times when you enter an instance. That's about it. Sure, there will be some marginal gains but nothing that is going to make you go HOLY CRAP.

[Fleecy]

Dito.

SCSI will slightly reduce the load times but it won't make any real difference to WoW. When I built my current system I was debating using SCSI II drives, but then downgraded and planned to use Raptor drives but then downgraded to SATA2. If you're after a fast kick ass machine for other games, or apps that are HDD read / write intensive then SCSI has no place in a home PC. If you have dollars burning a huge hole in your pocket and want to spend money on anything / everything then I'd go ahead.

[Nitro]

Why are you building one massive machine when 4 low end ones with enough memory, a decent CPU and even just an 8600 video card plus a central fast machine would most likely beat anything you can throw at it on the market today? All SCSI is going to do is slightly reduce load times when you enter an instance. That's about it. Sure, there will be some marginal gains but nothing that is going to make you go HOLY CRAP.

I have 11 PC's that can all run wow at max just fine however no matter how many times i try it i absolutely despise multi machine setups. My single machine 5 wow setup its what i love to play so i want to get it as refined as possible. I like to see all 5 clients accessible by one mouse on just my 2 monitors. I have 6 monitors infront of me, I like to do alot of stuff. 2 monitors for wow, one for TV, one for msn, xfire, websites, one VPN'd in to my work computers for monitoring emails and such and one for random crap.

http://www.knightsofshadow.org/ftpscreenshots/miscpics/wowsetup1.jpg

[Nitro]

Dito.

SCSI will slightly reduce the load times but it won't make any real difference to WoW. When I built my current system I was debating using SCSI II drives, but then downgraded and planned to use Raptor drives but then downgraded to SATA2. If you're after a fast kick ass machine for other games, or apps that are HDD read / write intensive then SCSI has no place in a home PC. If you have dollars burning a huge hole in your pocket and want to spend money on anything / everything then I'd go ahead.

What about the swap file? You dont think enough gets put in thier to make a difference?

[Xzin]

Only way to know for sure is to try it.

But if you have enough ram, you shouldn't be swapping anyway.

[Nitro]

mabey ill just try 8gb of ram and a 64bit os first and see how it changes

[Ughmahedhurtz]

mabey ill just try 8gb of ram and a 64bit os first and see how it changesWatch your HDD light on your puter (or however you monitor disk activity). If it's constantly lit up, then SCSI will help. If it does like most of us and only blips every now and then, SCSI will just sit there making your puter room hot. :P

[Djarid]

If you are going the SCSI route, I would also look for SAS (Serial Attached SCSCI) in place of standard SCSI... it uses the same bus as SATAII 3Gb/s but with SCSI drive electronics. considering SCSI is running at 320mb/s at the moment, you can get significant gains when running raid configurations due to the reduced latency.

Many SIS disks are 2.5" and I think the fastest is 10K RPM but the seek times are faster than a 3.5" 15K rpm. HP do a nice PCI-e card and shelf (1u or 1.5") that supports 10 drives... although I am not sure whether they have released the 3gb/s backplane for the shelf, even at 1.5gb/s it is a great solution :)

[Xzin]

WTF people. This isn't some corporate DB. WoW DOES NOT NEED 320+ MB / sec of bandwidth. 40 from a single hard drive should be fine per WoW install. I guess you can go for broke if you are hellbent on cramming this 5 box into one machine but I still fail to see the benefits here. Surely there are other bottlenecks too. CPU? GPU? Memory?

[Djarid]

I am with you on this one but Nitro wanted to know his options ;)

[Zuri]

I am five boxing on Vista 64 with 4 GB of Ram, Ram usage goes up to 3.2 GB when running five instances (I do run a batch file to kill off unnecessary processes before playing and turn off Aero). I am only low lvl atm so do not know if Outlands would use more Ram but would not have thought so. I guess a faster drive may shave fractions of a second of load times but is that worth the money?

[Djarid]

Remember that vista uses memory in a different way to XP. It will maximise the memory usage offloading into the page file only when necessary... XP used to keep as much of the Physical RAM free for spikes and so used the PF a lot more.

Basically Vista will show a lot more memory in use than XP for the same load

[kermitforney]

WTF people. This isn't some corporate DB. WoW DOES NOT NEED 320+ MB / sec of bandwidth. 40 from a single hard drive should be fine per WoW install. I guess you can go for broke if you are hellbent on cramming this 5 box into one machine but I still fail to see the benefits here. Surely there are other bottlenecks too. CPU? GPU? Memory?

From a bottleneck perspective I can only see the graphics card being the blame. My CPU is at about 40-50% average across 4 cores and hovers @ about 37c
even after being overclocked to 4ghz. My gfx card on the other hand is split between two monitors, one 22' widescreen @1680x1050 and one 19' @ 1280x1024
(split by 4 alts). The 9800GTX is HOT AS ALL HELL and hovers around 60c with framerates of 60+ on the 1680x1050 and 20+fps (max settings) on the 4 alts (low settings).
All this heat from a processor that had a die shrink and is running at a stock frequency????? YEah definately the gfx card.

[Nisch]

I run SCSI RAID 0 on my dual XEON machine. I actually see better load times on my new quad core/SATAII/64-bit system. I see no reason for SCSI other than in a server a server environment.

I agree, if you're using your swap file, you need more ram, not faster hard drives.

And I absolutely love the multi machine setup. I, too, have a hex-LCD setup, and I utilize every monitor. With mouse sharing setup, I can move the mouse anywhere I want.