Help for new SCSI setup

[supraway]

Right now, I have the computer with the specs you see below. I was thinking, I have saved up lots of cash, and want to indulge myself soon. I already have the two 40 gig IBM's in RAID-0. What I was thinking was buying a 9 or 18 gig SCSI hard drive, and setting it as my boot disk, and running all applications from it, the 80 gigger as storage.

What is a good, cheap place to buy quality SCSI hard drives, cables, and adaptors?

I am thinking a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM Seagate or IBM hard drive, in either 9.1 or 18.2 gig. What would be a good one?

Controller card - must be 40 mb/sec or higher, I think I saw an 80 mb/sec one out there.... I'm not too familiar with SCSI technology. What about a cheaper U160 controller?

Last off, I don't want to spend much more than $300 for this. Is the speed worth it? I would really like to have my 80 gigger simply as storage, as it is almost always full...

[Placid]

A good place to look is here as they sell most high end hard drives.

http://www.megahaus.com/cgi-bin/webstore.exe

Then go to www.pricewatch.com and find a resonable price on what you want.

Storage review is a good site for comparing different drives-controllers.
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html

[stool]

Seagate SCSI drives are excellent. I am currently using several of them in different boxes. As far as adapters, Adaptec, Tekram and Mylex make great adapter cards. I have always found eBay to be a great source of SCSI gear, and you never have to overpay. I would recommend going U160, as it is backward compatible with the slower specs and should well serve your purpose.

[Ridenow]

I agree with stool. Adaptec and Tekram make the best cards. The desktop model U160 from Adaptec is 19160. Tekram has a model that is similar, but much cheaper.
for hard drives, Seagate and Fujitsu are my favorites.
For cables and adapters I buy from http://www.jameco.com or http://www.hurricane-computers/com

[puppet]

The Tekram 390U3W will be your best bang for your buck.
Quantum made some nice drives.........if ya go the ebay route look for them. Otherwise I'd recommend
www.hypermicro.com
as well for your needs.

[Shadow ÒÓ]

if you are already running an IDE RAID, you're not hoping for tremendous improvements in benchmarks are you?

IDE RAID is more than adaquate for almost every home user, and SCSI is seldom if ever utilized for home setups.

[supraway]

Yeah, thats what I am really looking at... I'm not a guy for benchmarks, I really ONLY care about performance. My RAID is almost always 90% full, and I notice a huge degradation in performance when it is this full. What I would really like is for two drives, one for boot, Windows, and programs, the other for data (mp3's and my movies -- about 60 gigs total). The other thing is, I would like something where I could format every once in a while without having to backup data. So, the real reason is performance, and the ability to format the boot partition without loosing my data.

Most time on my computer is spent gaming, downloading, watching movies, browsing the internet, and every once in a while, encoding or working on music videos.

This is really why I ask, though. Is SCSI for me, or should I maybe do a fast IDE hard drive, and if so, what hard drive would be good (~20 gigs, not worried about security, just speed:))?

P.S. I just thought of this -- would that be a step backwards to buy a small hard drive, or should I just buy a massive hard drive and use THAT for storage, and my RAID as speed? Then again, that seems like overkill.... ACK I AM CONFUSED...

[Shadow ÒÓ]

buy 2 20 gig or 40 gig IDE drives....and an IDE RAID card.

remember your drives are not losing size, but doubling. (ie 2 40 gig drives would be an 80 gig hard drive in RAID 0)

[supraway]

Yeah, I already have a Fastrak TX-2 raid card with 2 40 gig IBM hard drives in RAID-0, as in my signature, but I need something faster... that is why I was saying SCSI as my primary hard drive. I was also thinking, if I could sell both my 40 giggers for maybe $55 or so apiece, I could probably buy one of those WD 100 giggers, then buy two 15 or 20 gigger (really fast) hard drives and put them on my RAID card as RAID-0.

[Shadow ÒÓ]

a RAID 0 array will be faster than a SCSI single drive.

if those 40 gig drives are 7200 rpm, I'd buy em both from ya.