Sample drive question.

[Max Arwood]

A friend of mine just took his computer to a shop. Period he requested a 4 TB drive. For some reason he ended up having a scsi drive  installed. 300/600 speed. After I thought about it, I don’t think this would be appropriate. It is an owner computer, but I think they should’ve put in at least a SSD drive.  To start with his drive will be for 8dio samples. 
What do you think?? He paid almost 400 for the drive and installation.

[Glenn Stanton]

for content and backups, a plain old HD can be useful - especially if you optimize the formatting for the sector sizes etc. definitely would want an SSD for OS and project disks though. $400 for the HD and install? you could get an external SSD for half that and a HD for about 1/4 of that...

[Amberwolf]

There was a time when SCSI was the only way to get the speeds of both drive access / seek time and data transfer rates to/from the computer, but the last couple decades has seen that rapidly fade.

The decade-plus-old 1TB spinny-type SATA drive in my equal-age laptop works faster, far quieter, lower power, and around an eighth the physical size of the 100gb? (maybe it was only 10gb?) 10,000rpm SCSI spinny drive that a friend of mine spent a fortune on to get a video editing system able to actually stream the data realtime...which it could just barely do. 

I don't know what modern SCSI drives can do, relative to the SSDs or even spinny SATA drives of today, but the one I have with the 16gb of ram I've got in the ancient laptop lets me use enough audio clips and audioloop tracks to do the stuff on my bandcamp site without problems in playback, while also sometiems recording more tracks with the mic or guitar. 

 

Not sure if this article is helpful, but it has some comparisons and explantions that include scsi

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ssd-vs-nvme

[msmcleod]

There are two things in question here:

1. The speed of the drive (e.g. HDD vs SSD)
2. The speed of the interface ( SATA vs SCSI vs NVME )

Depending on the generation of SCSI,  SCSI can be faster than SATA (150MB/sec)  & SATA 2 (300MB/s),  but slower than NVME ( 3,000MB/s to 7,500MB/s )

There are several generations of SCSI, the latest being:

Utra320 SCSI : 320MB/s
Utra640 SCSI : 640MB/s

By contrast SATA 3 is 600MB/s.

Obviously these speeds will be limited by the access speed of the drive itself.

So I guess the question is, what generation of SCSI is being used and what is the access speed of the physical drive?

You may find whoever installed it just picked the fastest interface that the PC could support - if it only had SATA/SATA 2 ports on it, then that explains the decision to pick SCSI.

In saying that, the speed of the drive has a HUGE impact here... for me a fairly large Omnisphere patch takes 45 seconds to fully load from a SATA 2 7200 RPM HDD drive,  vs 2 seconds from an SSD on the same SATA 2 port.