if you really want speed, get several identical drives and data stripe them in a raid setup, this effectively multiplies the speed of one drive by the number of drives you have after the first track is found. the idea being that the data is spread amongst the drives and they all look for a piece of it at the same time and are all pumping data during a file transfer. as far as getting drives, i'd get some with an sca connector on ebay, and look for a surplus sca backplane. beyond that, check the specs for seek time, buffer size, and maximum transfer rate, and do buy a wide scsi card. you can also set up a raid so that the same data is on more than one drive in case a drive dies, and i think you can still do striping then as well, though most people don't need the backup it's good for big engineering projects, servers, or banks etc.
i've got some back plane sca boards that accommodate 6 drives each, they just need an enclosure and power supply and then just one cable to the computer, all the other connections are taken care of on the backplane board. i haven't set it up yet, but when i get some money i plan to buy a stack of identical drives on ebay and set up a big raid file server on my fastest machine and serve files to the other machines over ethernet. this way you get truly huge storage for all your machines and really high speed on your main machine, which ideally will connect to a 100bt or gigabit ethernet switch for the other machines (though i'll probably just go 100bt, most of my machines aren't that fast and i don't think there's a lot of gigabit stuff surplused yet). as much as i'm starting to hate ebay more and more (they've absolutely no clue about security and really don't care about scammers as long as they get their money...) it's the place to get drives cheap, often new. there are several listers selling boxes of new scsi drives that are fast and wide with an sca connector. the sca backplanes i have are surplus from compaq servers. if you're interested i'll try to look up who i bought them from, they were inexpensive and are well made, including slots for airflow, though i did get them a couple of years ago (the last time i had money, but i never got around to getting a stack of drives, just as well as larger ones are available cheaply now). the sca backplanes also use standard pc power supplies, and have connections for 2 of them if you get redundant supplies. the backplane even takes care of setting the scsi id. > << > When choosing a hard drive, what should I look at for speed? Everything? > Rotational speed, access time, cache, anything else? Also, anyone suggest any > models to avoid for reliability reasons? > >> ------- -- --S363, aka Philip Stortz-- Find your number at : < http://iharder.sourceforge.net/soundex.php>< http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/08/MN253740.DTL> Maybe the real "criminals" are those who claim to be working in the interest of "National Security", the last refuge of the scoundrel... -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
