Dragon NaturallySpeaking

[onewecallgod]

dont worry about reliability, these are SCSI drives; they dont die

before you buy, post the SCSI controller card youre buying, just in case to make sure its the right one

once you get that stuff running, its going to be smoking fast. you'll load windows in less than 5 seconds!

[Bryan Crow]

Hi, David.

I see that you're the resident heatsink and cooling fan guru, so I'm going to read a bunch of your stuff so that when I haul out my tower and open the case this week, I'll have some idea as to whether I need to upgrade before I overclock. Probably I do. I'm sure I'll have to come back to you with questions.

I also see that NCQ is a SATA II upgrade, so I assume you weren't recommending a Seagate drive for me, correct?

Five reviews I read made the Fujitsu SCSI drives sound like the Second Coming.

Meanwhile, at http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/sto...seagate/72007/, I found this:

"For most home users, there will be no tangible benefit from Native Command Queuing. While benchmarks may look nice, our real-world tests said otherwise. That is not to say that NCQ is useless altogether, but for the majority of desktop computers, you're not going to see a performance gain as you would with a jump to a newer processor. However, in situations when Hyper-Threading is being tapped, we saw some improvement in the results that would not be seen without a major hardware upgrade."

Bryan

[Bryan Crow]

onewecallgod:

This is from newegg.

Adaptec PCI-X to Single-Channel Ultra320 SCSI Card, Model "29320A-R" - Retail

Model# 2060500
Item # N82E16816103172

Specifications:
Interface: 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X
Ports: One 68-pin HD(External), One 68-pin Ultra320, One 68-pin wide Ultra, One 50-pin narrow Ultra
OS Support: RedHat Linux 8.1/9.0, SuSE Linux 8.1/8.2, Novell Netware5.1/6.0, OpenUnix 8, Sun Solaris 9 (x86), SCO / Caldera UnixWare 7.1.3/Open Unix 8, Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/Server 2003
Features: HostRAID RAID 0, 1, and 10 data protection (Windows and Linux); Adaptec Seamless Streaming; 320 MByte/sec performance per channel; Seamless backward compatibility protects legacy devices; Industry-leading compatibility and reliability; Adaptec Storage Manager - Browser Edition to manage HostRAID

[Bryan Crow]

David, I just skimmed your power supply guide. I looked more thoroughly at your heatsink guide last night, but I haven't yet had time to read them properly. Nevertheless, I can see you know what you're talking about and that you're a good writer. Bravo, buddy. A commendable service to the overclocking community.

I wish I'd been just west of your town this afternoon with those 200,000 other people. I used to go down every February.

[amilian]

Hey Bryan,

With your single SCSI you won’t be running RAID, since you need two drives to set up a RAID, so what you will be doing is running the 1 drive you buy in single channel all by itself. It will still be very fast and great for DNS. That guy I was talking about from knowbrainer forum (Wizwill) jumped from fast 2x disk RAID0 to a single Ulra320 SCSI with Adaptec controller and he was amazed. He describes it as ‘the bomb’ and you won’t look back. I trust this guys judgment based on all his other posts at that site.

You may even want to double-check with him by posting over there to make sure you’re getting the right combo of SCSI and controller card. He also may offer advice and things to avoid. I do recall him recommending do a low-level format of the SCSI when you get it.

Regarding the supercacheNT, this is the one that works best for me. I’m assuming it will work just well for the SCSI setup, but I suggest if you have the time to try all of superspeed.com products before you settle on one. Also, if you have a huge amount of RAM, then maybe running a large ramdisk with that extra ram will be the best solution. I don’t want to steer you wrong here, so take your time in choosing. I’ve tried all their products and settled on supercacheNT (obviously it is the older version and I’m not even sure if that link I provided is NT version 4.3 so you better check). When I tried their Ramdisk with my amount of ram (512) I can only set up a small ramdisk and put DNS on it by itself, and it doesn’t seem to perform as well for me as the supercache on my c: with DNS on c:. I’ve read that with a good amount of ram, it technically should perform better than the supercache, but I’d have to see it to believe it.

Thinking about it further, you should really try the SCSI alone first, see how it performs in the real world without the superspeed software on it. Then try the demo supercache on it and see if it’s worth the investment. I’d really be interested in hearing how the SCSI goes with and without it too so please let me know if you do this! But look at those ATTO scores with the supercache compared to dbase’s raptor RAID0 setup. Supercache is amazing. Take the 64kb score. He got write of 94519 and read of 40524. Superspeed is 778195 and 909809; 8 times the writes and 22 times the reads!!!!! So with the very low average seek times of the SCSI, with superspeed providing that huge MB/s transfer, how can you go wrong?!!!

Yes, a ghost backup is a good option. I use ghost 2003 and it works well. I’m trialing ghost version 9 but it doesn’t come with the recovery disc, so I can’t trial the recovery from a boot environment, so I’m not sure I want to buy it yet.

Which PSU are you getting? I hope you read the sticky on PSUs as it’s got some great info.

[onewecallgod]

Originally Posted by Bryan Crow

onewecallgod:

This is from newegg.

Adaptec PCI-X to Single-Channel Ultra320 SCSI Card, Model "29320A-R" - Retail

Model# 2060500
Item # N82E16816103172

Specifications:
Interface: 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X
Ports: One 68-pin HD(External), One 68-pin Ultra320, One 68-pin wide Ultra, One 50-pin narrow Ultra
OS Support: RedHat Linux 8.1/9.0, SuSE Linux 8.1/8.2, Novell Netware5.1/6.0, OpenUnix 8, Sun Solaris 9 (x86), SCO / Caldera UnixWare 7.1.3/Open Unix 8, Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/Server 2003
Features: HostRAID RAID 0, 1, and 10 data protection (Windows and Linux); Adaptec Seamless Streaming; 320 MByte/sec performance per channel; Seamless backward compatibility protects legacy devices; Industry-leading compatibility and reliability; Adaptec Storage Manager - Browser Edition to manage HostRAID

i'm not sure whether or not that will work in your system. its made for 64bit PCI, which is usually found in high performance workstations and servers, not home PCs like ours. the official PCI-X specs state that these cards are supposed to be backwards compatable to the 32bit PCI we have, but i'm not sure if this card will too. ill do some more digging and see what i find out

[davidhammock200]

I have never worked with DNS. I have setup many SCSI RAID arrays of various types for servers & a few workstations. i t would seem to me that if you are going to invest in a SCSI RAID controller, you might as well get a 2nd HDD & run RAID 0.

Since your mobo has only 32-bit PCI slots available, what SCSI RAID controller are you going to use?

Dave

[onewecallgod]

Originally Posted by davidhammock200

Since your mobo has only 32-bit PCI slots available, what SCSI RAID controller are you going to use?

well the official spec sheet for PCI-X (64 bit) states that it is backwards compatable with 32 bit PCI, although we all now how manufacturers like to ignore those....

Ninja Edit:
Bryan, you got 2 choices for this. you can get 1 73gb 15k RPM drive for $480, or you can get 2 36.7gb 15k RPM drives for $418. i'd go with the $418

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

well the official spec sheet for PCI-X (64 bit) states that it is backwards compatable with 32 bit PCI, although we all now how manufacturers like to ignore those....

Please post a link.

[onewecallgod]

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications...hite_paper.pdf

you can either download the official PCI-X white papers and read it, or take my word for it

[davidhammock200]

I'll take your word for it, server mobos have 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots, cards for these slots are not ususlly backwards compatable.

[amilian]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications...hite_paper.pdf

you can either download the official PCI-X white papers and read it, or take my word for it

Thanks onewecallgod. I see on page 4 it says it'll work in Bryan's 3.3v pci slot, thanks.
Bryan, I agree regarding the $418 RAID0 solution. That will be extremely quick. You will be very happy.

[davidhammock200]

Should work fine & 2 HDD's will not even push at the 133MBs transfer limitation.

[amilian]

On the question of sata vs scsi, and DNS software which seems very high transactional data and lots of reading writing of .dra audio files as well as .voc voice files and .dat files, here's a few words from Adaptec on sata vs scsi, and it seems that scsi is the right solution:

[amilian]

Originally Posted by davidhammock200

Should work fine & 2 HDD's will not even push at the 133MBs transfer limitation.

Ya, that's an interesting point on the transfer limitation. And even if it did, the supercache software with 'lazy-write' mode enabled would probably serve to avoid any bottleneck.

[Bryan Crow]

I see I didn't make it clear that I planned to get two SCSI hard drives plus the SCSI card:

Hard Drives FUJITSU 36.7GB 15,000RPM SCSI HARD DRIVE, Model MAS3367NP
Quantity: 2

1 Adaptec PCI-X to Single-Channel Ultra320 SCSI Card, Model "29320A-R"
Quantity: 1

Is this combination of two hard drives plus the card going to work with my motherboard? Set up for RAID 0? Is this what you recommend? I take it no one's dissenting at this point.

I don't think SuperSpeed offers SuperCache NT under that name nowadays. What I downloaded for trial is called "SuperCache II and SuperVolume Desktop Edition." I really don't know how to set the thing. Lazywrite should be on, correct? I set it at 1.the company used to offer "SuperCache for Dragon 7," whatever that was. I'd probably better ask them. I'm wondering now if 2.5 GB of RAM might not be enough to hold everything for Dragon NaturallySpeaking so you wouldn't need to "cheat." I mean, with that much RAM, maybe SuperSpeed would be better than SuperCache.

By the way, my mobo's a Gigabyte K8NsPRO nForce3 250, not a Gigabyte K8NNXP nForce3 150. They seem about the same.

BC

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by Bryan Crow

I see I didn't make it clear that I planned to get two SCSI hard drives plus the SCSI card:

Hard Drives FUJITSU 36.7GB 15,000RPM SCSI HARD DRIVE, Model MAS3367NP
Quantity: 2

1 Adaptec PCI-X to Single-Channel Ultra320 SCSI Card, Model "29320A-R"
Quantity: 1

Is this combination of two hard drives plus the card going to work with my motherboard? Set up for RAID 0? Is this what you recommend? I take it no one's dissenting at this point.

I don't think SuperSpeed offers SuperCache NT under that name nowadays. What I downloaded for trial is called "SuperCache II and SuperVolume Desktop Edition." I really don't know how to set the thing. Lazywrite should be on, correct? I set it at 1.the company used to offer "SuperCache for Dragon 7," whatever that was. I'd probably better ask them. I'm wondering now if 2.5 GB of RAM might not be enough to hold everything for Dragon NaturallySpeaking so you wouldn't need to "cheat." I mean, with that much RAM, maybe SuperSpeed would be better than SuperCache.

By the way, my mobo's a Gigabyte K8NsPRO nForce3 250, not a Gigabyte K8NNXP nForce3 150. They seem about the same.

BC

Yes, the SCSI solution is excellent!

The N3-250's are much better than the N3-150's, so that is good, too.

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks, Dave. I'll go ahead and order the stuff then. Newegg is good. They shipped the DIMMs by FedEx yesterday. (Today is Presidents' Day. No US Postal Service today.)

[amilian]

Originally Posted by Bryan Crow

Is this combination of two hard drives plus the card going to work with my motherboard? Set up for RAID 0? Is this what you recommend? I take it no one's dissenting at this point.

I don't think SuperSpeed offers SuperCache NT under that name nowadays. What I downloaded for trial is called "SuperCache II and SuperVolume Desktop Edition." I really don't know how to set the thing. Lazywrite should be on, correct? I set it at 1.the company used to offer "SuperCache for Dragon 7," whatever that was. I'd probably better ask them. I'm wondering now if 2.5 GB of RAM might not be enough to hold everything for Dragon NaturallySpeaking so you wouldn't need to "cheat." I mean, with that much RAM, maybe SuperSpeed would be better than SuperCache.
BC

Yup, is compatible with your board, and RAID0 is the way to go - provided you back up with ghost regularly, since if one drive fails you will lose all data and have to replace drive and reinstall from scratch. You may want to consider RAID0/1, but it won't be as fast. I'd go RAID0 and ghost.

SuperCashe II and SuperVolume Desktop Ed. I'm not sure about lazywrite mode. Those scsi's will write so fast that you probably won't need to lazywrite. Their own disk caching will probably be awesome. 2.5GB of ram, you will be able to make a very large RAMDISK - up to 2GB and that's way more than you need for DNS. I managed to fit my 6.1 Pro Dragon on a 200MB ramdisk. I know version 8.0 is bigger, but not sure how big. Right click the DNS folder and click properties to see how big it is.

Also, there are speech 'hotfiles' on c: that the program accesses during it's use. With the SCSI raid solution, it will access those blisteringly fast anyway. I actually put those hotfiles on my ramdisk by editing the registry, but it's tricky and recommended only for those familiar with regedit. But in your case, a 1GB ramdisk will be plenty. Your SCSIs will give you the low 3.3ms seek times Dragon responds to and your ramdisk the huge I/O transfers that Dragon loves. The perfect solution. You won't get better and will have the absolute bomb.

Like I say, don't buy a superspeed product until you know which one works better for your hardware.

If I were you, I'd visit the adaptec website to read up on FAQs for installation so you're prepared. Make sure you have the scsi drivers on a floppy (should come with the controller) so that when you install windows as it's booting you press F6 to specify your scsi RAID and controller drivers. Make a note of how long install takes. It will be blistering

[davidhammock200]

I have never put the OS on a RAID array and rarely the application software,

usually just the data/page/swap & temp files.

Is there something special about DNS?