SCSI systems have out paced the capabilities of the PCI bus which is where you see most SCSI controllers used in a desktop environment installed.
SCSI based systems have migrated in technology to the PCI-X slot which is 64bit which doubles the bandwidth for the scsi controllers & drives
The "best" choice of all is the new SCSI controllers connected to the PCI express "bus" although the PCI express is not really a bus its often referred to that way for lack of a better term. Anyway the bandwidth is greatley improveed, even better than PCI-X and the express "bus" is dedicated to each individual card just like video cards that are PCI Express or AGP is also a dedicated "bus" or dedicated path to the CPU processing actually.
yes; PCI Express scsi cards and Ultra 320 drives are the fastest drives going; however they are insanely expensive at this time. You can buy high grade drives for about on even money (raptors vs U320 SCSI 15,000 rpm drives) but for my opinion the Raptors are a bit over priced; they are using the fact that with SCSI you need to buy a controller card, therefore they can sneak closer to the cost of SCSI drives and people will still pick the Raptor because you dont need the controller.
As far as comparision of the PCI express SCSI controller with 15,000 rpm drives connected to it versus the Raptor I cant say!
the ATTO pci express SCSI controller card is damn near $500.00 clams! I got the 15,000 rpm drives but I am waiting to get my hands on that controller for $300.00 then I could "see" for myself.
My current set-up is faster (see my system specs) than the single drive Raptor performance in HD Tach benchmarking but in REAL world performance I cant see
much of a diff I know my PCI bus is not getting overloaded when I am running a single drive so therefore increasing the SCSI bus width is not going to help me. I have a Raptor on my office machine and see these machines as close; with the edge going to the SCSI machine.
The SCSI drives dont tax the CPU nearly as hard as the SATA drive does, I think that's
really where the only improvement I am seeing is coming from, during super heavy loading of the system with reading & writitng commands to the drives the SCSI is noticibly faster there; but not seen when writitng and reading is sporadic or pauses in the flow of "traffic" occur.
I think the smartest set-up for you when you want speed without spending Ferrari club money is using two Raptors in a raid array. Just make sure you back-up your data properly, becasue with a striped array if you lose one of the drives you lose all data; because one half of a write is written to one drive and the remaining gets written to the other drive.
the SATA raptor raid array will get results of the fastest for the "right" money. However; just as a teaser I cant wait to see what a striped array of 15,000 rpms drives will do on a PCI express SCSI controller either! I have a gut feelignt there will be some wow factor in that.
right now on the PCI bus you cant raid two SCSI drives without saturating the bus
dont hesitate to ask more questions
if you dont mind spending about $1000.00 you could get the job done!
my wife would not only kill me for spending $500.00 on my dream controller; but I think she would do kinky things to my corpse!
