Maxtor’s 15K RPM SCSI HDDs (36GB, either 68-pin or 80-pin) now cost under US$200. I can buy them for about US$170 (plus 10% VAT and US$2-3 shipping) per unit. WD’s 10K RPM 76GB SATA HDD costs about the same.
Is the idea of 10K RPM for IDE HDDs almost dead? Which would you choose if you have both SATA and SCSI controllers?
I would go for the raptors because of the double amount of space. 
Buy two and put them in RAID0. 
Naturally, 10K RPM SCSI HDDs cost less than 15K RPM SCSI HDDs. I have two 146GB Seagate 10K.6 10K RPM SCSI 320 68 pin HDDs. If I had to sell them, I would sell each for under US$200. 
(Probably when SATA 6Gbps appears.)
A regular 7200 RPM drive (perferably Hitachi’s 7K250 series).
15K and 10K aren’t worth it due to the increased noise in a workstation (I presume you’re going to use it in yours). Sure, it’s faster but for most 7200 RPM HDDs are more than enough. For server applications they’re great but you usually aren’t in the same room…
//Danne
The question was not personal but general regardless of the applications (servers or desktops.) And just if you were to choose between 10K RPM SATA Raptor and 15K RPM SCSI of the late generations.
Personally speaking, my main HDDs are mostly 7,200 RPM PATA or SATA HDDs because capacity per cost is my priority, not access and seek times and longer warranty years. I don’t “choose” because I prefer getting both at once usually for the things that I really care. For servers, it’s difficult to upgrade frequently because they are located physically too far from where I sleep and eat daily and I don’t have a helicopter.
What I was interested is whether even WD, the only one dared to make 10K RPM IDE HDDs, is giving up thinking 10K RPM for IDE HDDs isn’t a profitable idea. WD gave up on SCSI HDDs some years ago because SCSI HDD market seemed to WD too small and not enough room for market expansion. Samsung once was interested in SCSI HDDs as well and actually released some SCSI HDD products but never after.
I want SILENT hard disks. Since neither 10K nor 15K are even remotely quiet, I’m uninterested.
However, as a purely academic exercise… SCSI is still better/faster, ESPECIALLY for concurrent operation.
The Raptors are loved mainly for their very fast access times. 15k RPM does not necessarily lower access times. But the access time is what makes a drive “feel” faster. The Raptors also carry a 5 year warrantee and are built very well, use heavy heat sinks, etc. They were intended for enterprise server applications, and got hijacked by the desktop market. Personally, you would have to pry my Raptors from my cold dead fingers to get me to give them up. This pair in RAID-0 have been running 24/7 almost since Raptor first came out. They are awesome at multitasking.
I’d like to see some real world tests of the Maxtors that reflect access time and multitasking performance.
Unfortunately RAID-0 using Raptors doesn’t improve performance noticeably.
//Danne
Sorry for the question a little dumb and off topic :o : why SCSI discs have a so little capacity comparing with IDE or s-ATA? Are there other differences in hardware other than connecting interface? Are there mechanical differences between these types?
I think what you meant to say is that RAID-0 hasn’t made a noticable difference for you.
Generally, the difference is that the higher RPM drives have one platter, where the larger drives have 2 or 3. My guess would be that multi-platter discs don’t like to spin at those speeds.
Thanks for your answer also if is off-topic
@ rdgrimes
No, http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1
If you haven’t gotten the hint by now, we’ll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.
//Danne
You’re most likely better off (price and performance) with two 7200 RPM drives for sequential reads and writes but oh well…
//Danne
im not gonna get into the pros/cons of RAID-0 arrays, but FWIW in my experiences my Raptor RAID arrays are faster than any of my 7200RPM SATA/PATA drives…that’s good enough reason for me to keep them…
Of course they’re faster but “reduction in reliability” is not worth it. Run the Raptors as JBOD instead.
//Danne
not worth it TO YOU…which was rdgrimes’ point (i believe)…
JBOD provides no addtl fault tolerance than RAID0 whilst also not providing the added performance benefit…so that’s an even more unadvisable method of setting up HDDs…
On a technical level yes. But in practice I think no. Even your sentence says so, you chose 10K Raptor over 7200 IDE 
. I sure wouldn’t recommend someone to buy a 5400rpm harddisk, since you can really see the big difference over any 7200rpm hdds!
Most people who’ve used Raptors and/or 15K SCSI HDDs (of the late generations) say they are silent. Some of my very old SCSI HDDs running at 7,200 RPM are noticeably noisier than my Seagate 10K.6 running at 10,000 RPM.