Hard Drive Interfaces (SCSI, SATA, Etc)

I'm looking at hard drives for my new build, and I'm starting to get a little bit confused with the different interfaces available, and what my motherboard will support.

Components:

• Asus Maximus Formula
• Fujitsu 73GB @ 15,000RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
• Fujitsu 73GB @ 15,000RPM SCSI Ultra320 68pin

I've looked into all of this a little, including Hard Drives 101. Basically I'm wondering if any of the above will work with my mobo, or if I would have to purchase an SCSI controller or something?

Thanks a bunch.

Not out of the box. You would need a SCSI controller. The SAS drive and ultra 320 use different connectors so be careful what controller you buy if you choose to go with SCSI. It will get expensive as well.

Okay thank you....I will probably just go with a WD Raptor (Sata150)

Raptors are overpriced. I would just get a large SATAII drive with 16MB-32MB of cache. If you really want speed then setup a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array.

Yeah, I actually just looked into this a few minutes ago, and I think I'm going to get 2 150GB HDD's @ 7,200RPM and setup a RAID 0 Array, this would actually be faster than one 10,000RPM Raptor wouldnt it?

I would go with the 320GB 16MB Cache SATAII hard drives for about $80.



It depends what you mean by faster, the transfer rates will be higher but the seek time and latency wont be faster.

This is actually not true. 1 high speed sata HD is faster than two regular sata (or any type of HD) in RAID 0. RAID 5, in a desktop? Yeah, I hope you have lots of fans, and money for a desktop. RAID 5 is more of a server side technology.



The thing is, the raptors have a very fast seek time, way faster than your average HDs, add in the 10,000 RPMs, and the 5 year warranty on a Raptor, it is the better HD.



Do not RAID 0 your desktop for gaming, you will get zero performance increase. RAID 0 is only really beneficial when you are actually utilizing its advantages. RAID 0 does not increase your fps, it does not give you a better frame rate, it does not make anything run smoother, it does not make really anything on a basic level run faster. Office applications, web browsing, all of that is going to perform the same. Now, if you are editing video or recording audio or something where you are working with multiple files at once that are all many gigabytes in size, then yes a RAID 0 can be up to 40% faster. For a home user, its not worth it.



Go compare the average latency on a Raptor to every other HD, in most cases they are twice as fast.

Then what if I purchase a 10,000rpm Raptor (150gb) with my OS/games on it....can I purchase purchase another 7200rpm (500mb) to store all of my music, movies, pictures, etc?



Basically I just want a main drive (Raptor) and a secondary drive as most of my storage...without RAID..could I do this?

Yes, and that is basically the idea. You put your OS and apps on a fast drive and your data on a slower one. RAID 0 also puts you in the chance of a full system crash since data is shared amongst 2 or more drives.

I'm not too worried about the chance of a system crash ...



also I was thinking, and you said that the Raptor would be faster than 2 7,200rpm in raid 0 because it [the raptor] has faster seek times, write times, etc...but since the 2 7,200rpm drives are in raid 0, wouldnt they be faster? even if the write time on both of the 7,200rpm drives is slower than the write time of the raptor, wouldnt they be faster sense each drive only has to write half of the data (since they're in raid0) while the single raptor would have to write all of the data itself?



^^I don't know if that makes any sense...I tried to explain it as best I could.