Joseph Brockert wrote:

Great thread, My 2-cent, I have 12 machines, all but 1 tyan tiger 133 dual pentium, 500's to 933's, 1g memory,

3 machines ide raid with 3ware, 2 machines software raid adaptec 39160 SCSI U/160 using both channels 6 machines adaptec 2100 SCSI Raid U/160

just getting machine 12 running, not much data yet, tyan tiger 2518, 1.4g with adaptec 2120 SCSI raid U/320, but it sure feels quick

to me nothing beats SCSI hardware raid based....joe

Since you do not say, I'm guessing that the 2120 RAID U320 has very fast hard disks, plus ample RAM cache on board. Are the other SCSI/IDE drives similar in performance? Howver in general I agree with your statement. If performance is important I go with the fastest U320 drives I can buy and a real hardware RAID controller such as the Intel or Adaptec ones. You still get a lot more flexibility from the SCSI bus - i.e. you can put a number of hard drives on each cable/channel before the bus is saturated. With parallel IDE you end up with a LOT of ribbon cables (round or not), with SATA, the cables are smaller, but its still a nest of snakes. Mind you two 5 connector SCSI U320 cables are not nice either - but if you have a decent case and mount your drives correctly, you can minimize the mess. You spend way too much time tinkering with the other solutions - the hardware SCSI solutions "just work". You get better tech support too when you are paying $500 for a controller instead of $39. But for my home file server, I've bot an Epox motherboard with six IDE ports - 4 are htp374 raid capable, but I only use Linux software raid cause, yes, its faster. - Richard