Just curious as to whether anyone knows or has some hard facts, if using a SCSI drive for a Server makes much of a difference in site speed? Never having owned one I do not know if they last as long as an ATA or what their stability is like.

And are most people using ATA 7200 these days, or still trying to get some life out of old 5400?

I prefer SCSI, but others prefer IDE because it's cheaper. This has been discussed many times, let's not start another flame thread about it. Please do me a favour and do a search...

My only comment so far is: yes, there are still 5400 drives out there in very cheap "servers".

SCSI is still (can be anyway) a lot faster. I.e., 15000 RPM, compared to 7200. Also, one of the points of SCSI drives, is so you can use them to offset one another, in which, at least you couldn't used to, do with IDE. If you can afford SCSI, I'd use it, but I think IDE are fine, but SCSI is better.

SCSI supports more devices, has more prepherals, can carry more bandwidth/data, better/more command queuing, better seek times, better throughput, work better at higher temperatures, built better (generally), and are just better suited for a lot of drive access, bandwidth transfer and flexibility -- i.e., are better for a server than IDE (literally).

Unless you're needing more than 2 drives, IDE 7200rpm drives will probably be fine. If your server is going to be doing ALOT of disk I/O then you would definitely benefit from 10000rpm or faster SCSI drives. You'll also get less CPU usage with SCSI, because most of the processing is handled by the processor on the SCSI controller. IDE depends on the system processor to do the same work.

No flaming required, I was just curious as I said. Did do a search and found one recent post on this subject with the rest being related to Hosting offers.

The reason I'm curious is that even with SCSI's having proven itself a better drive (from what I hear anyway) Hosters using them seem to want an arm-and-a-leg if providing them. I've seen 9 or 18 GB SCSI's as opposed to 80 GB IDE drives and the SCSI's were a more expensive package. I'm trying to see if the reduction in available space is worth the speed increase.

The days of sites having mostly static pages and the odd server-side script seem to be in the past. With the increase in server-side processes/applications (Forums and mySQL especially) it sounds like SCSI would almost be worth it. That space reduction though, is really something to think about.

Price is definitely the largest drawback to SCSI. It's tough to figure out whether or not the performance increase is worth the huge extra cost. Basically the cost difference is so much because SCSI drives typically are around 3 times the cost of a same size IDE drive. Looking online a decent 36gig 10000rpm SCSI drive is somewhere between $200-250. Add another $200 or so for an Ultra 160 SCSI controller and thats the main reason for the huge price difference between a server with SCSI and a server with IDE.