15000 RPM Hard drives

[Featherstone]

Why does no one use them? I mean, I am sure it has to do with storage size and cost, but those people that are looking for 1 HD for performance and 1HD for storage, why do they get raptors? Is it all because of cost?

Here is what I'm thinking
36GB Atlas 15k 15000RPM HD- ~$150
and I see SCSI cards for like $30, do you need a decent SCSI card or will any old card work? Are these $300 cards for specific tasks or what?

anyway, so lets say $150 HD and $50 SCSI card. and then you have 36GB which seems plenty big for Windows and a few of your most used programs.

It just seems like you would hear more about these drives in an enthusiast forum like this if they were good. Or people would suggest them for those guys that are looking for $5000 computers.So why doesn't anyone use them? Compatability issues? Do they just not perform as good as you might think?

 

[shata]

Yeah id like to know about this also, 200$ isnt bad for 15k drive

 

[choirbass]

im not positive about this, but, i believe the performance of server class scsi drives, such as the 15k cheetah, is optimal for multi user [server] environments, with tons (and tons) of random reads and writes, much more than any single user would do... but for single user environments, such as a desktop... the performance isnt anywhere near as good... dont know why really, just that theyre optimized and specialized for server usage, high cue depths(?), low seek times, ncq... and any other server specific functions where it would excel, but not quite so much for typical desktop usage... ...but, aside from that, they do cost a lot like you said... for single user environments for desktop usage, i believe raptors are better suited (and theyre ironically cheap compared to equivalent capacity scsi drives/controllers)... but for most consumers, raptors are considered overpriced, considering the relative performance increase, and limited capacity

now, im probably wrong about the server aspects of scsi drives, and why they are better suited for use in servers, compared to desktops... but its somewhat similar to that, i believe anyhow

 

[shata]

Hmm hopefully someone post and tell us for sure if its better or worse for gaming.
Btw i like your Sig picture very unique of you.

 

[choirbass]

thanks

 

[nvalhalla]

Take a look at this

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2919&p=5

The more random the read the lower the SATA scores. Not important for single users but bad for servers.

 

[Valtiel]

I assume noise could factor in somewhere...

 

[shata]

Those sataII benches are pretty impressive.