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

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.

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.