I was wondering if there's still a big performance difference between a SCSI HDD and a 7200rmp IDE Harddrive for webservers.

Thanks.

Not at all, if the SCSI drive is top of the line 5 years ago, running on a computer that was top of the line 5 years ago, and the top of the line IDE drive is running on a top of the line computer from today.

It depends upon your usage whether or not the extra cost of SCSI can be justified. Unless you have a very busy server, IDE should be up to the task.

Investigate the 3Ware (http://www.3ware.com) RAID controllers and the Western Digital IDE drives with 8MB cache.

Another thread is here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57884&perpage=15&highlight=ide%20scsi&pagenumber=1)

Good luck, you've entered a minefield.... :D