Hi all, I'm going to be purchasing a couple scsi harddrives but I also need to get a cheap pci scsi controller card and when I start to look around at the various cards the shear amount of options leaves me confused. The drives I'm looking at are the "Seagate Cheetah X15 ST318452LC 18.4GB 15,000 RPM Ultra320 80pin Hard Drives" so I need something that is compatible, that has hardware raid support, preferably for less than $50 u.s. Is this wishful thinking on my part price wise? I've heard others have purchased cheap ($35) cards for their scsi drives, but don't remember where I read about it. The main purpose of the scsi drives will be to load game maps (fast!) and some live multichannel audio recording. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.

Not for nothing but to use a cheap scsi interface card for raid or not is plain foolish....especially with top notch drives like those you plan on useing.
Becarful and make sure you find true hardware raid capable interface cards as some claim to be hardware raid and in reality is software raid.I know of no scsi raid interface card for u320 with hardware raid thats under 100 dollars let alone $50.

Good luck and please post back the card you will use and how she works after sometime in.

thanks

An 8 SATA connector hardware RAID controller from 3ware and a few Hitachi T series drives. This setup will be very fast loading up files without consuming a lot of power and being much quieter than the 15000 RPM drives. If you use a minimal of four drives, it should be sufficient to handle raw sound recording or raw video recording. You get about 1 terabyte of space for a lot less money than a SCSI setup. To increase the performance even further is to use two 3ware cards and RAID 1 (mirror) which will access two different files in parallel. Usually games access sound and music files when they load a game map.

A 15000 RPM hard drive is not any faster than a 7200 RPM. A 7200 RPM drive can do a lot better than a very good 15000 RPM drive. The reason is the warping of the platters at very, very high speed. Also the warping causes errors that makes the drive work harder. What you get out of a 15000 RPM hard drive is high power consumption which relates to a lot of heat that does make it better than slower RPM drives. A 7200 RPM is the minimal speed for magnetic mediums can go with out doing a lot of error correction.

I suggest using XFS as your filesystem. It is much faster than people think.

Sorry that it's taken me so long to reply guys but I've been working like a dog recently. Thank you for both of your advice. I have been doing alot of reading on the subject of scsi raid and I bought a ST336754LC seagate cheetah scsi drive but it's not supposed to arrive until tomorrow. I still need to get a controller raid card and I've pretty much decided on one of the Adaptec 29320 or preferably a 39320 depending on my funds at the time. I've also looked at the sata scsi issue and yes, as far as speed goes it is a very close match between sata and scsi. However the thing that swayed me to go with a scsi drive is that this is my work computer (yes I game on my work machine), and I've had an IDE drive go bad in the past couple months and scsi drives are known for their reliability. I'll post back in a couple weeks and with results.