This is kinda a continuation of my previous question. I am trying tojustify spending $219 on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 36gb and another $150 on a controller.

By the way, what is the difference between

LSI U320 Single Channel PCI-X SCSI
LSI Logic Single Channel U320 SCSI HBA

Other than about 45 bucks, I can't find out what the differences are.

Back to my issue. I am running some diagnostics on my machine to see if I should upgrade my CPU/motherboard etc. When I look in my task manager (winxp) it says I am using 100% of my CPU and 247MB of PF. I used another program I downloaded and it shows my CPU hitting 100% about every second. But most of the time it seems to be at 0%. It just kinda blinks up to 100 for a split microsecond and then back down for a half second pause, then back up. etc etc. Same with my RAM. It also shows SWAP. I am not sure what this is but it is at a steady 28%.

My proc is an AMD, and I think its a 2100 or 2200. Something close. I bought it in march of 2002. Its around 2GHz if I remember correctly. Also have 1gb of ram, can upgrade 512 more.

Hanschka

Here are some more numbers that I really don't know what the mean. ( numbers are rounded, they constantly change.)
Handles    7925
Threads      397
Processes     38
Commit Charge (K)
Total     252800
Limit    2520436
Peak      253572
Kernal Mem
Total 41300
Paged 33000
Nonpaged 8224
Physical
Total 1048096
available 746100
cache 294650

If you have to justify spending money on SCSI, you probably shouldn't. SCSI is for folks who don't have to watch their budget very closely.

Maybe a 10,00-RPM Raptor by Western Digital would be better for you.

PCI-X is the next generation PCI bus. You would need a motherboard that supported PCI-X to use that card.

This entry might help a little:

http://radified.com/blog/archives/000124.html

If your CPU is spiking, find out what's making it spike. I would disable whatever it was. Shouldn't be doing that.

What are your other questions?

Intels new chipset looks awesome. Maybe I'll wait till its been out a yearand try to find one on sale.

I think I explained myself wrong. I am not trying to justify the money, but the need. I was wondering if there were other upgrades I should make that would be more important or better for performance other than the scsi drive. I am using a diag program and my cpu isn't spiking anymore, but my ram is only at 350-400mb, and I know i have a gig in here. What are SWAP? and VRAM? at 13$ and 5% repspectively. Anyway to get better use out of the RAM?

It seems there are so many things I could upgrade I just want to do what will have the biggest impact. Or, possibly just upgrade the entire machine.  Considereing my motherboard is an ASUS a7v333-x, rather old and on the cheaper side.

Justifyng SCSI depends on what you do with your system, as I describe in the SCSI guide:

http://scsi.radified.com/

If you do lots of disk-related things, then SCSI is more likely to boost your system's performance, and therefore be more "worth it" for you.

The only real way to know is to drop a nasty 15K-rpm SCSI beast in there and take 'er for a spin around the block.

I wouldn't worry about the other. Windows will allocate as necessary.

I'm more concerned about *reliability* than performance. System performance has climbed so much the last few years that performance is usually never an issue any more.

http://radified.com/Articles/stability.htm

And SCSI's middle name is "reliability".

Is your system performance disappointing?

Performance is only dissapointing when I try to do things like edit video. Normal photo editing is usually o.k. Unless its huge or I am batch editing several 8mb imiges at once. I do a fair amount of batch editing. Can take 5 to 10 minutes if I have a very large batch. Compressing video on DVD is very time consuming. 2 hours worth of film being compressed to fit on one single layer 4.7g dvd takes about 3 hours or more.

The SCSI guide really made it sound like that would help the system alot. But I don't know that much about computers so I wanted to make sure. I chose the Cheetah because when I upgrade the rest of my stuff (who knows when that will be) I will move the cheetah over too.

What prgm are you using to edit video?

Editing is Windows Movie Maker or Nero 6 ultra. I compress them using DVD Shrink and burn with Nero 6.

I am not familair with Movie maker.

I started with Premiere:

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/main.html

Then moved to Vegas:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=965

Then Avid Xpress DV:

http://www.avid.com/products/xpressdv/

Now using Avid Pro:

http://www.avid.com/products/xpresspro/

which you can get for cheap with a student discount:

http://www.studica.com/products/shoppingcart.cfm?productid=7879&productpriceid=54474