I happen to like SCSI. It's a bit more expensive, but does seem to have a slight edge in performance. It's also nice to have the ability to have more than two drives on the controller. I think RAID for audio is overkill. If you keep your files backed up, you should be fine.

themidiroom

Ummm...why aren't these questions being moved to the computing section? That's where they truly belong you know! :roll:
SCSI is nice but very expensive and will not gain you any performance in the long run...
take a look at this:
[[url=http://[/URL]="http://forum.nuendo…"]SCSI vs IDE Test[/]="http://forum.nuendo…"]SCSI vs IDE Test[/]

The Western Digital Drives are truly opening up the IDE bandwidth and leaving room for the PCI bandwidth for audio cards and DSP cards...
Raid is not needed for audio and indeed will not gain you any performance in any way...
HTH
Opus

Properly configured SCSI systems can gain in excess of 200% performance gain. I'd say a good 99% of people do not know how to properly configure a SCSI system however... If you opt for SCSI in a system, make sure it's installed by fully qualified personel.

SCSI was designed to be faster in the area of multiple synchronous accesses. Therefor, multiple threads running on the drive in different areas at the same time, will be more efficient than IDE. The largest boost of performance is generally seen in Server applications, video editing, 3d modelling, etc..

As was even stated in the linked thread, SCSI does help in audio, when dealing with large numbers of tracks. Simple audio functionality isn't going to improve much, since even basic IDE does fairly good with multiple synchronous accesses, just not as good as SCSI.

Another plus is the fact that you can drop up to 15 devices on a single SCSI card, with NO drop in performance (With IDE, the more devices on a channel, the lower the performance, which is one reason you can only drop 2 devices on a channel). That's right, 15 100GB drives will get you 1.5TB ;)

RAID configurations, depending on the type of RAID, can do several things, amongst protect your data automatically, prevent ANY down time (hot-swap a dead drive and you're running again after a drive failure), and even increase performance (certain types of 'striping').

Overall, SCSI is a nice to have, but not a 'need' to have. If you have the money, spend it.

W.

P.S., the post shown above was relative to 'recording' only, and using CPU load as a meter, which is hardly a guage on HDD transport performance, since SCSI was designed to work independently of the processor (which makes me wonder about those results!)... The obvious increase in performance would be relative to editing, not recording.

Nowdays they have made PCI RAID cards for normal IDE drives. Since SCSI is super fast and expensive per Mb. I would go with IDE RAID. You dont need to be that fast with audio. adaptec makes a nice 4 channel: http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=AAR-2400A&cat=%2fTechnology%2fRAID%2fATA+RAID

Or if you have lots of money you could get a maxtronic Indy-2600 FC and load it with 15 Maxtor 250 Gb harddrives.(about 2.6 Gb of usable disk space when set to RAID 5) Now that would be some cool $hit

http://www.maxtronic.com/new_html/mission_critical_raid.htm

Just be damn sure to do HARDWARE RAID, not software RAID (I figure that was what they did with the test above, since the CPU load was supposedly greater on the SCSI machine).

W.