western digital raptor?

How much of space do you need?

For example if you are using 2 drives of 100gb in RAID0 configuration you will have 200gb of space. (not exactly 200gb..)

15K drives as I remember you can find from 36gb and up.

SCSI card is PCI and/or PCI-X card. There are many different ones, it must be Ultra320 as well as drives.
If you have Ultra160 card and Ultra320 drives it will than work as Ultra160. THere are Ultra640 as well but they are still expensive.
Ultra320 mean as I remember 320mb of transfer per second. This mean max transfer from all drives attached to the card (SCSI go up to 15 drives), this does not mean that single drive is able to transfer 320mb of data per second.

Yes it is a bit hard to setup, if you are beginer, but there are several good tutorials on the internet. If you are familiar with computers you will learn it fast.
We can help you as well.

Basically you have jumpers on hard drives and they go from 1-15 (except 7). Each drive need to have unique number (channel). For example drive 1 is channel 1 and drive 2 is channel 2. First Hdrive attach to the first connector on the SCSI cable and second one is next to it.
SCSI cable must have terminators on the end. (they usually have)

There is a seller on the eBay called scsi4me that sale these cables for $10.

Than, during the boot process you will see a new screen with option to enter settings by pressing 2 keys at the same time.. This is a way to enter and configure your SCSI controller.
There you will need to setup drives to work in RAID 0 and the rest is easy.

You just need to download drivers on floppy disk and press F6 to load SCSI drivers during the installation process..

 

doesnt sound to hard.
since the pc will only have one user and no bloated program then i dont really need much space.
a 36gb system drive should be fine with a sata drive as documents and backup drive.
it doesnt sound to hard to setup.
i would only use raid if i was to have two sata drives and not if i had a SCSI drive since there is no way i could afford two SCSI drives
it means i would have a very fast system drive and fast boot up time with a slower drive for backup and documents
i have found a 73gb 10k rpm SCSI drive for £100 but from the same website they didnt have a price for the 36gb one.
but on the other hand fast SCSI drives are a luxury thing and part of me tells me to get normal 2 7200rpm seagate burrcudas and get a EMU sound card to connect to my stereo in my room since i listen to music alot.
lodore

 

Here is some good reading.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/12/cheap_raid_ravages_wd_raptor/index.html

I have a 74gb Raptor. no complaints.

 

agreed, the 74GB has a higher areal density and that directly enhances its performance in all performance metrics over the 36GB

RAID 0 ain't worth it IMO especially a ROMB
especially if you have a Raptor for the OS

its for transitional performance space,
and I doubt you need that level of performance unless your planning on real time video editing
you can gain most of the "apparent" advantages by employing multiple pages files and multiple HDDs for concurrent read\writes without substantially increasing the probability of data loss.

start here > http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd2/

STR (sustained transfer rate) as a performance metric is BS. unless as mentioned above your dealing with one huge sequential file
access time, caches, command queing, areal density and spindle speed are king
these days when comparing apples to apples (spindle speed and areal density generations) you typically have very tight access times between brands, and it comes down to caches sizes, and how "smart" the drive is in finding what is requested (firmware\command queing)

http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=Benchmarks
nay nay ne naay naay my drives faster than yours is
(benchmark BS part 12 as debunked by storagereview)

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html

 

Hi lodore,

I appreciated that it's your thread but you've now substantially drifted away from the original topic.

Hope you don't mind but I've split the last few posts on sound cards into a new thread titled <Sound - On Board Chip or Dedicated Card?>.

Regards

 

no its fine thanks

 

@Ice,
Have you tried/tested Intel Matrix RAID? IMHO, it gives real value to ROMB.