Originally posted by: vash
SCSI was built for 24/7 uptime and made for enterprise environments where data is key. IDE drives were meant for desktop use, where someone pulls the plug from them on a regular basis. If you want something reliable, in a RAID-5 situation, I would recommend getting SCSI.
Here's another thought on the IDE/SCSI for RAID. For many SCSI drives, you can get *nearly* the same exact drive 2-3 years down the line, with roughly the same specifications. For IDE, that is much more difficult. For RAID situations, its always better to get matching drives. SCSI makes this easy, IDE can make this difficult.
vash
1 Terabyte of Space = 14 x 73Gig SCSI drives. You won't be able to fit these on a single channel if you throw an extra drive for parity into the mix so you'll end up with (7 + 1) x 2 = 16 Drives.
A quick check at newegg... Fujitsu 73GB, 10krpm = $349
1 Terabyte of Space w/ parity = 5 x 250Gig ATA drives.
Another quick check at newegg... Maxtor 250GB, 7200rpm = $262
Total Cost for SCSI = $5584
Total Cost for ATA = $1310
I don't have the MTBF numbers in front of me but you could replace every single drive in the ATA setup four times over and still cost less than SCSI. "But what is the cost of your downtime!", you say? Dunno. He'll have to make that call. SCSI might be more reliable but what's the chances of having a drive fail when you have five of them? What are the chances a drive will fail when you have 16 of them?
SCSI has it's place for sure, but this ain't it.