scsi hard drives and controller

[blackshadow]

I am working on building a file server and was wondering is it worth it to spend the extra money on a 15,000 rpm hard drive? I was thinking of getting 2 37 gig 10,000 or 15,000 rpm scsi hard drives and wasnt sure which one. I am planning on using it for music and video storage so that all my computers could easily access it. Also could anyone recommend a reasonably cheap controller card that will work with ultra 320. Thanks.

[Xaotic]

For your boot disk on your main workstation, if you had the cash, yes go 15K U320. For a fileserver, it's generally overkill. The normal bottleneck is the network connection and IDE can easily keep up with that. Use RAID-1 or 5 for data security and maintain a backup strategy. Conserve the cash and reserve the speed for applications that need it, unless you have absolutely critical data. Then SCSI RAID can become worthwhile as the native CRC checks on writes can provide additional data security. I'd probably drop to 10K RPM for fileserver drives unless it's getting hammered by lots of users.

For your application, go with an IDE RAID and save tremendously in terms of cost per GB.

The LSI 21320 is pretty affordable and some versions can be modded for dual channel and RAID. Unless you have a workstation or server board, with 64bit PCI slots, there's no point in getting anything faster than U160. Even so, unless you are doing constant IO on many more drives, U160 will be fine. Get the LSIU160 for around 40.00 and cable/terminator and drives, if you go SCSI.

[blackshadow]

Thanks, I think I will go with the IDE RAID as I have a limited budget and its just a small scale server thats mainly going to be accessed only by me.