Raptors really worth it?

[Santilli]

Andy:
If all you want is a boot drive, get the fastest X 15.3 Cheetah you can afford. You already have the scsi expensive stuff, and selling it is just going to mean loosing more money.

LVD and the new single Cheetahs are a just about perfect match.

s

 

[Adcadet]

am I seeing this correctly? 18 GB 15K3 1 year warranty for $89? There's also a refurb 36GB SCA 80-to-68 pin 15k3 with a 1-year warranty for $139, and a new 18GB 15K3 for $145.

 

[Adcadet]

and why wouldn't I spend a a few dollars more for the Maxtor Atlas 15K ($179), the drive that out performed the Seagate Cheetah 15K3 ($145)? Have people really had bad luck with Maxtor stuff? Back in the Quantum days they seemed OK.

 

[Adcadet]

performance URL from above that I screwed up

 

[Santilli]

Yes, if you have a backplane, jump on the 80 pin scsi/sca. I've been thinking about a similar backup solution, and, I can buy, and use, a 4-6 drive scsi/sca box, with hot swapable drives, for about 200 bucks, from hypermicro. While not the cheapest solution, it would sure be nice...

s

 

[Adcadet]

no backplane, but they're offering SCA drives with an 80-68 converter.

 

[Santilli]

Converters are not a very good idea, IIRC.

s

 

[Santilli]

Check that. Cheap converters...
s

 

[timwhit]

I used a Hypermicro converter for two years on one of my drives and never had any trouble. Unless your application is mission critical, I wouldn't worry about using one.

 

[Clocker]

given that 95% of the world is never going to use scsi, blowing smoke up that 95%'s rear ends, and telling them they have the best, and buy from my sponsor is a pretty good move.

Thunk*

-------------------------------------------

*Thunk: the sound of a hammer hitting a nail on the head.

This arguement kind of falls apart given that SR so strongly recommends against using RAID-0. By doing that, they're not really pushing people to buy more cheap drives from their sponsor. If SR was in WD's or Hypermicro's, or Hitachi's back pocket (as implied) I think they would recommend everyone use a quad-drive Raid-0 arrays backed up nightly to a separate home made IDE based NAS device.

 

[Santilli]

I don't think your average computer buyer is going to go for raid 0, and, so far, Raid 0 solutions for ide haven't been worth much, due to interface, cards, and drive speeds, so why recommend something that doesn't really increase speed, as it should?

Plus, IDE and SATA are consumer priced technology. I suspect if you spend 700 dollars for a sata, or ide raid card, the chipsets are going to move some data, cache will be sufficent, and you will get a bit of a benefit, unlike using a Promise raid card, that may not even work as described.

The average Storagereview reader isn't going to go for Raid 0, and why should they with the reliability record of some of the drives?

You take two questionable reliability drives, and geometrically increase your chance of system disk failure?

s