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Brians256 · 06-04-2007, 02:13 PM

According to my research and the IT guys at work, both IDE and SCSI are not good solutions. If you want better performance, go with 10K RPM SAS drive array. If you want higher reliability, go with RAID-6 or RAID-10 arrays with SATA drives for better reliability at less price.

SCSI is overpriced for marginal reliability improvements of the array (individual drives will be better, of course). IDE is a dying standard with inferior cabling.

The sweet spot price/GB of drives seems to be 320GB to 500GB. I bought 750GB drives because I know that the 750GB drives will come down in price and if I went with 250GB or 500GB drives, I would have had to go with a more expensive RAID card, a bigger power supply, a larger case, etc... just to get the same capacity. As it stands, I can probably add another 8-port 3ware card and have the array span the two cards.

For a low-end NAS, just get a mobo and run FreeNAS to do RAID on the built-in IDE or SATA ports. However, unless you are determined to use drives already in your possession, why wouldn't you buy SATA?

06-04-2007, 02:13 PM	#10
Brians256 Pro/Staff Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Klamath Falls, OR Posts: 1,439	Re: picked up a free computer According to my research and the IT guys at work, both IDE and SCSI are not good solutions. If you want better performance, go with 10K RPM SAS drive array. If you want higher reliability, go with RAID-6 or RAID-10 arrays with SATA drives for better reliability at less price. SCSI is overpriced for marginal reliability improvements of the array (individual drives will be better, of course). IDE is a dying standard with inferior cabling. The sweet spot price/GB of drives seems to be 320GB to 500GB. I bought 750GB drives because I know that the 750GB drives will come down in price and if I went with 250GB or 500GB drives, I would have had to go with a more expensive RAID card, a bigger power supply, a larger case, etc... just to get the same capacity. As it stands, I can probably add another 8-port 3ware card and have the array span the two cards. For a low-end NAS, just get a mobo and run FreeNAS to do RAID on the built-in IDE or SATA ports. However, unless you are determined to use drives already in your possession, why wouldn't you buy SATA?