[jmmijo]

Oooo nice, I'm going to be looking at upgrading my server, perhaps the time is right to look into these monster storage drives

Damn, I just read the PR and it says availability isn't until the fall sometime

[jmmijo]

Well I'm trying to maximize my storage capacity by getting either the WD 250GB SATA's or the WD 250GB PATA's.

If I go the SATA route I can create a 750GB RAID 5 array from the 4 HD's. However if I go the PATA route I can get a 1.2TB RAID 5 array from 6 HD's instead

The difference is that I've noticed a performence difference between the PATA and SATA interface, you get a bit better sustained rates with SATA. Could be less overhead and hopefully with the nextgen SATA II spec you get the nice command queuing.

[jmmijo]

APK,

I have the Promise SuperTrak SX6000 I2O controller card. It's a 6 channel caching card with 4 x 120 GB PATA drives. The problem isn't really with it's performance but with the storage capacity. I really would like to upgrade all these drives to 250GB versions using all 6 channels. This would be great however I'm looking into upgrading my server to dual-opteron's but the caveat now is wether there are drivers for the 64-bit version of Windows XP

I'm waiting for a reply from Promise on this one, as well as wether any of their cards will work or not.

I just got back a bid for this monster server however the pricing is a bit high. I expected that but I may look at alternatives as well if I receive bad news from Promise.

As for the performance difference between PATA and SATA drives, well I see a much faster load times between a RAID 0 array on PATA drives vs. SATA. Is it a lot, not a whole lot, a few seconds but it's very noticable with my gaming rig since moving over to SATA raid vs PATA raid.

It's got to be the sustained data I/O rates are just better with SATA drives in general, wether in single drive or a RAID array.