new to the SCSI Interface

[X2Xtreme360]

In order to set all peripheral devices such as HDD, CD-ROM, Printers, etc. would SCSI be the best way to go? Let's say I have 1 printer, 2 CD-ROM drives, and 4 HDD's set up in RAID 0+1, which generation of SCSI would be the best, I assume Ultra 320 SCSI? And in order to set up SCSI, does my mobo have to support it or is it as simple as connecting a host adapter?

 

[turtile]

SCSI is for commercial systems such as web servers.

Its going to cost you a mountain. The devices are more reliable.

If you want to add all you devices as such, just upgrade your whole system to a server/workstation machine.

 

[Nitestick]

well personally i would never put the words simple and SCSI in the same sentence. for most purposes people should stick to SATA as it is cheaper and provides virtually all the advantages the average person *may* gain from SCSI. the additional features of SCSI are really only useful in enterprise.

 

[X2Xtreme360]

well for something uch as RAID, would I buy SATA expansion cards to support the extra drives? Cause for RAID it would be 6 drives (4HDD, 2 CDROM) while SATA can only support up to 4 drives.

 

[Ste]

There aren't that many Optical drives (So far as when I last checked) that are SATA, Usally people get the Optical drives in EIDE Form and 1 on each channel and then have the harddrives as SATA.

There are motherboards with more then 4 SATA Ports.
And the Optical drives would have nothing to do with RAID.

 

[X2Xtreme360]

yea I wasn't sure if you could incorporate IDE and SATA or if you had to run one or the other.

 

[Nitestick]

like Ste said. take for instance the LanParty SLI-DR. it has onboard IDE and 8 SATA ports. now you can use one of the controllers (it has two controllers, each controlling 4 ports) to make your 4 drive RAID array. then you can use the onboard IDE for your optical drives. once again like Ste said, they would not be in the RAID array and there are only a few SATA optical drives anyway. in fact when i last checked only Plextor made SATA optical drives

 

[turtile]

You can still add more SATA ports with the PCI and PCI X slots.

 

[Nitestick]

[being pedantic] PCI-X is only found on servers. do you mean PCI-E (PCI-Express) or PCI-X?[/being pedantic]