Storage:
Controller
(1): Adaptec UW SCSI 160 RAID 3400S
Price: $891.17 (latest price
here)
Sure our motherboard has SCSI, but that's not enough
dammit, we need
RAID to really make this thing excessive. Though in reality of course
RAID is something that is quite useful, at least if you're worried
about a hard drive crashing. Sure that isn't really a huge concern for
gamers, but having all of your data perpetually backed up onto a second
hard drive is something that could come in handy one day. Since price
is no object we're going to go with a really excessive 4-channel card,
just so we can fill up one of those 64 bit PCI slots that the
motherboard needs. This is really gratuitous, but that's really what
this is all about isn't it? Hell, we can even dump up to 128MB of
SDRAM onto the RAID card, not that we'd need it, but the possibility
exists.
Controller
(2): Promise Technologies Fastrack 100 IDE RAID
Price: $77.45 (latest price
here)
Since we have RAID on the SCSI end, we might as well go
for it on the
IDE end as well, again, not because we need it, but because it's a nice
level of security to have. As with the Adaptec SCSI card, we can also
dump some extra RAM onto this baby if we really want, but for the usage
it's going to get, this is likely a move that isn't worth considering,
even for this excessive project. Seeing as we've completely nullified
the SCSI and IDE controllers on the motherboard you have to be asking
yourselves... Why go for IDE *and* SCSI? That up next.
Storage
(SCSI): IBM UL36LZX 36gig SCSI Ultra 160 (x2)
Price: $975.18 each (latest price
here)
4.9msecs average seek time, nuff said. Though there are
15,000rpm
drives out there, good luck trying to find somewhere that can sell you
one. IBM has some damn fast, and of course damn expensive SCSI drives,
the LZX being their speediest of the lot. Sure it'll sound like an airplane is
taking off when you fire up your computer, but the
performance of these drives make it well worth it. Plus you have IBM
backing them, something that in itself lends considerable credibility
to a market whose performance can sometimes be hard to quantify.
Now we all know SCSI is better than IDE, though in recent
years IDE has
really caught up in terms of what users would actually notice. As CPU
speeds ramp up, SCSI's independent processing becomes less and less
important leaving it to rely on its incredible bandwidth to justify its
cost. Still, for a project like this, SCSI is the way to go, two
drives of course so we can mirror them with our nifty little RAID card.
Storage
(IDE): IBM Deskstar 75GXP 75.0gig ATA100 IDE (x2)
Price: $507.95 each (latest price
here)
So we've got a mirrored set of 36-gig badass SCSI hard
drives... what
are we messing with IDE for? Well simply put SCSI might be fast, but
it doesn't have the colossal size of IBM's 75 gig ATA100 drives. Sure
36gigs will do us nicely when we want to have games, operating systems
and software on the drives... but when you start considering converting
all of your hundreds of CDs to ultra high quality MP3 format, you need
a damn big hard drive to store it all. So, if all we're worrying about
for these drives is MP3s and the like, we can afford to have a slightly
slower IDE interface (though nothing below 7,200 rpm of course,
anything slower just wouldn't 'fit' in this box.
And of course we also have IDE RAID mirroring the drives
just to make
sure if one crashes we don't have to go and rip all of our CDs again. Sure you
might have your CDs and stereo right by your computer, but
just think about how much easier life would be if you could change your
CDs from your desk, keyboard and mouse... without even having to get up
out of your chair. With this ability one wonders if there would really
ever be a reason to leave your seat.
Next page: Additional drives
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