SCSI
This may sound dumb but I wanna know what is SCSI and do every PC has one, how can I know if mine has it. I use ASUS Boards Pentium 3. Please help me I’m in the dark.
Thanks and Peace
SCSI is a standard for connecting devices to a computer. Most commonly, SCSI is used for hard drives, tape arrays and less so these days, scanners. SCSI back in the day was the Macintosh’s equivalent to USB. SCSI is very stable and very fast, but also very expensive. Now days most everything uses a combination of IDE (for hard drives and tape drives) and USB (scanners) to achieve what SCSI did. SCSI is still used in many server applications. SCSI is able to put up to 7 devices on a channel (versus 2 with IDE) which allows for folks to make larger RAIDs using RAID 5. RAID is a way of using disks for redundant storage. (IE, one disk dies, the whole array doesn’t and the server keeps working) So do you have SCSI? Probably not. Most PCs (and Macs for that matter) do not have SCSI on board. You will only find it used anymore in servers. Do you need SCSI? Um, probably no. IDE is quite adequate with the introdution of ATA about 5 yearsago. Plus, IDE hard drive and controller… $150. SCSI hard drive and controller… $600. Don’t worry about SCSI.
Firwire is Macintosh’s equivalent to USB !
SCSI was used because of its low CPU usage on transfer and faster transfers rates.
today SCSI isnt prefered because IDE is as fast enough on transfer and also the cpu usage with DMA used on IDE hard disks is as low as on scsi disks.
Only in high priority systems and server today scsi is used.
Thanks a lot guys big help indeed! One more thing. Do I need more RAM for FX’s?
Nope, FX use processor resources, not RAM. The two things to look at for performance when dealing with audio only is a fast processor and fast hard drive. A fast hard drive will allow you to run more tracks and a fast processor will allow you to use more effects. If you are using software samplers, that is when you would want to be sure to get plenty of RAM. I have 1.25GB of RAM, but I also use a ton of samples. If I were making a brand new audio only machine I would probably feel comfortable with 384-512MB of RAM.
thanks again man for the info!
Peace