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| If you can use it at all, I'd sure give it a shot. Might even be worth getting one of the add on controllers if yours doesn't support RAID.
I have an old Dell Precision 650 that has two 3.2 GHz P4 Xeons in it and until recently had a couple of Seagate 7200 rpm IDEs. I built the machine a few years back from parts found on the net from several different places, and in addition to the usual two IDE channels, the main chassis came with an integrated SCSI controller and a cable with attachments for up to 4 drives.
I have a geek friend who for years had told me how much he liked SCSI so when I recently found a guy on ebay selling SCSI drives that had been removed from servers somewhere, for $150 I bought a box of ten u320 15,000 RPM Fujitsu 36 GB SCSI drives and put 4 of them in the old Dell that supports RAID 0 (stripe) resulting in a volume size of about 136 GB. Talk about bringing things to life - I don't think I've ever made one change to a system that's made such a noticeable CHANGE in the system. Each of these drives has an 8 MB buffer, so in the stripe arrangement the SCSI controller just fills one buffer after another and just goes on it's merry way. It isn't quite like running everything out of RAM, but it sure makes me wonder what it would be like...
Out of curiosity I also tried the SCSIs in a couple of other configurations to see where the differences in performance really came from. As a single drive the SCSI was similar to the IDE for performance, maybe slightly better - probably because of the rotational speed difference. As a two drive stripe volume performance was noticeably better, but I really LIKE it with a four drive striped volume. The point is that I think the main difference is the RAID configuration much more than any difference in IDE vs. SCSI. It's just that the SCSI interface that was built into this machine supports RAID 0 and the IDE interface does not.
I was originally concerned about reliability of the used drives, since RAID 0 has NO fault tolerance (it's all about speed), so I let it dump the whole thing periodically to one of a couple of large IDE drives in a caddy that slides in and out of the front of the box so the backups can be rotated. The SCSIs have run perfectly for about a year and a half, so the other six drives are still in the box in the basement. I was also surprised at the reduction in noise from the drives. One of the 7200 rpm IDEs makes over twice the noise you get from four of the 15K rpm SCSIs.
As mentioned elsewhere here, there are other RAID configurations that offer mirroring for fault tolerance, some offer mirroring AND the speed advantage of striping, one will even let you swap out a malfunctioning drive and then rebuild itself on the go and never shut down, so if you were adding a RAID controller you could choose the features you want.
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recomendations for a hard drive, please
