15,000 rpm, U320 SCSI

Heya! I know alot of people need alot of space but for basic stuff a 36GB HD will work for the OS, games, etc.(for me at least)
I have a motherboard with built in U320 SCSI. I put a 18gb 15,000 rpm hard drive on it and got a hd tach scroe of over 160mb/s on the long test. This is on a ibm intellistation pro z with dual 2ghz xeons. Not state of the art by no means.

Now for my question: Does anybody have any benchmarks with these drives in a raid 0 and raid 5 configuration? Do these drives beat a 74gb raptor? I know it doesnt beat my 36gb raptor.(At least from the tests from HD tach)

Thanks in advance!

On that, or any other chassis, a single 18GB 15K U320 should have STR in the 70MB/s to 90MB/s range and I'm being generous on the upper figure. The lower areal density on the platters hurts performance and around 70MB/s is very normal.

U320 RAID is possible, but you probably will not like the costs involved or the performance. There are two methodologies to get RAID. The less expensive option is zero channel RAID(ZCR). The ServeRAID 6i, as will higher level version, card will work with the existing onboard controller and costs around 110-150 on ebay. Full RAID controllers are also a possibility, but prices range into the 6-700 or more range and this is a case where you get what you pay for. Either way, performance will be substantially less than the close to doubling of STR expected with IDE RAIDs. On RAID-5, there are substantial write penalties that can cripple performance with lower level and even moderately high level controllers.

I was getting around 140MB/s reads and 110MB/s writes from a 5 drive array of 73GB 15K drives on a 6i, if I remember correctly. Using 18GB drives will likely reduce performance due to the lower density.

In terms of desktop performance, Raptors beat SCSI on a cost basis as well as performance, unless you are running very high IO patterns(like a server). Raptor RAID will handily outperform SCSI RAID as they are intended for quite different purposes.

The 15,000 drive, in particular older models, won't have much more contiguous data transfer rate.

they will be much better with complex access pattern, though.

Loading a game can either be a pretty random pattern that likes the 15,000 rpm drive, or some games are actually doing contiguous loads of huge files. The latter are typically FPS games. The former are typically less developed games that assemble their data from many disk files such as many war/strategy games.

In doubt, add more RAM instead