Theres a fact to remember ( and its lost on most IDE folks it seems
)
U320 is power for a big array, it was built to accomidate the high data flows from massive arrays. U160 was choking with big arrays still.
An array to an IDE person is 2 drives 4 at the most ( 2 channels). To a SCSI guy 5 - 15 drives in a real array, 2 - 4 drives is just a few discs. With lets say 50 - 60MB/sec of physical read speed off a 15kRPM SCSI ( bestcase) you run out of bandwidth on the SCSI chain on a U160 with 4 drives (this is assuming 100% data use and no overhead, which never freaking happens). with U320 you can get 8+ drives working and loose very little data speed.
So... if you went with 320 you are doing it to get 4+ drives running. Otherwise I would recomend going with U160 goods. You still will NEVER EVER fill up a U160 channel with 2 discs.
And if you are going RAID, some Mylex is Ok, LSI is pretty good, Adaptec is nice, but pricey. There are some others but I would stick with those.
I currently have 3 36GB 10k/15k RPM drives ( one IBM and 2 Maxtor 8mb cache drives) in my workstation on a Tyan Thunder K7 using the onboard Adaptec dual Chan U160 controler (using only one chan) The streaming write speed is pretty damn impressive on all them, I dont think I need any hardware RAID for the machine since I dont see the benifit for the cost. Now on the other hand by the end of the summer I plan on upgrading to a new Dual Xeon setup on the Tyan Thunder i705 workstation board with the dual U320 SCSI and getting the Zero Channel RAID board upgrade for it.
My home server has 10 9.1GB 7200 and 10kRPM drives in it on 2 UW SCSI channels ( on a Dual Chan Mylex RAID controler), its nice, but I dont like Mylex much at all.
SO thats my lil thing about SCSI... I had SCSI in all my computers since I was like 11 or 12
I had SCSI drives and controlers in my machine for 6 years before I owned my first IDE drive. How I miss SE SCSI, all this LVD now... just not right
hehehe