Is SCSI Worth it?

[TheJackal]

Well, is SCSI worth the cost?

[HAL9000]

That all depends on what you are doing... for the average user... probably not, especially with the new serial ATA drives that are currently out. For high end servers with a lot of thrashing of the drives... yes.

[Blakhart]

Blakhart says yes.
Get a recent scsi HBA and at least a 10krpm U160 drive and enjoy the lowest cpu usage along with the fastest access times. Did I mention there are many 15krpm drives about?
HAL is right on the useage aspect though. If you game and cost is no object, U160 or U320 all the way. That can also be applied to a server expected to cough up hundreds or thousands of pages.

[Force Flow]

What will you be doing, TheJackal? We may be able give you more pointed answers if you tells us ;)

[TheJackal]

Programming/web development and a bit of graphic design.

And Blakhart, what is an HBA?

[Blakhart]

Host Bus Adapter, otherwise known as a scsi card...
In a static web creation or programming scenario, scsi will be of little help, other than the apps will load real fast. In this case storage total may be your goal, and IDE is king of cheap storage. Then again, if you emulated an os to test software, the reduced cpu load of scsi may be worthwhile. If you wanted to do video editing, scsi owns. Things to think about.

[TheJackal]

Just another unrelated question. I hate Windows XP, So whenever I do put together a new machine, whatever it has in it, it wont have XP on it...

So, how do Windows 2k, and Red Hat handle SCSI:?

[Blakhart]

Wonderfully.
But xp may be better at everything than 2k, although only slightly.
I turn off all the cartoonish stuff in xp and run it with the setting for max performance, wich makes it look and act just like 2k. Xp has a better scheduler and acpi implementation than does 2k. If you can use xp, I say do so. Nothing wrong with 2k tho. And Linux loves scsi long time. I will add that I had trouble getting Gentoo to boot from a scsi subsystem... installed fine, ran great, dunno what was going on there, my Linux guru was stumped as well. Could have been a cable, ID, or termination problem.
Keep in mind that no M$ os since 98 or 95 has a scsi aspi, and M$ directs everyone to get it from Adaptec, no matter what brand HBA you use. You don't really need it, but it may sort out any problems, or give a slight performance boost. I have run scsi on xp pro and s2k3 with and without the aspi, and noticed no real difference. All ran fine and still do.
:D