Original message: Seth, I don't mean for this to dissolve into a "my dog's bigger than your dog", but I'd like to point out that Pricewatch is listing a MegaRAID 128 board with two U+W SCSI channels for $89. It supports RAID 0/1/5 in firmware. I'm using a 3-channel version with 128M of cache and fifteen refurb 4.5G 7200 rpm hard drives I picked up cheap a couple of years ago. They're set up on one channel as a single bootable 63G RAID5 array. With Seagate 73.4G 10K rpm drives I could add a terabyte array on the second channel for under $4.5K. The point I'm trying to make is that SCSI performance, capacity, and reliability can be had for a not too unreasonable price. To be sure, it will cost more than a corresponding IDE solution of the same capacity, but I'm told size isn't everything. :-) --Doc Savage Fairview Heights, IL Original message ends. Doc, Sounds like you have it under control. I also was not trying to "dissolve into a "my dog's bigger than your dog"". The SCSI RAID controllers can be had for a very reasonable price and if you can get used SCSI disks you will be ahead - no question. We only use new components here and within that limitation, the price and performance point to IDE RAID using the 3ware cards. They work wonderfully and provide very very high performance for us and our customers. Try loading 6 to 10 linux machines over gigabit ethernet and see where the bottle necks are on the server. At that point it comes down to NFS, Disk I/O and RAID 10. We found that the IDE RAID 10 Array we use (6 x 200G for 600 GB storage) handles it nicely and was inexpensive to implement. I have come to believe that SCSI vs IDE may be another one of those "religious issues". No offense intented - just trying to help. Best, Seth
