Raid (sata/pata) vs scsi?

[jorwex]

if you were concerned strickly with performance and speed (and cost--but the point is that you're NOT concerned with capacity), what would be the best choice for a new harddisk setup? a RAID0 array with serial drives (if the difference between parallel and serial is significant) or having a single scsi drive?

just in general, what's faster? specifically im considering getting two 74 gig raptors or two 80 gig parallel/(cheaper)serial drives or scrapping the raid idea and just getting a smaller 10,000 or 15000 rpm scsi drive & controller card.

i realize that my question leaves out specifics n stuff, but just in general, what's the hierarchy of speed? i couldnt find benchmarks comparing the different solutions.

thanks!

 

[racolvin]

Honestly, it depends on what you do

I bought the SATA drives not for the performance boost (there is hardly any right now anyway) but purely for the luxury of the cabling.

I personally went with a dedicated RAID controller (LSI Logic) and a RAID 5 setup. RAID 5 is a little slower on writes to the array, but hella fast on reads, which is mostly what I'm doing with mine. I also like the protection factor of RAID 5 versus the other options.

If you do a great deal of writing to your drive, a different RAID type would be better for you probably.

R

 

[jorwex]

thanks for the insight racolvin. does anyone know specifically how scsi fares?

 

[whiteagle]

Don't have the benches in front of me, and I'm too tired to look them up iirc. However, 15k rpm scsi fastest with 2 10k rpm sata in close tow. Personally I'd go with the sata.

 

[bacillus]

Nothing beats SCSI for multitasking!