Now for the exciting part! With a few keystrokes in the Adaptec SCSI interface card bios, I set up the pair of 15K.3 hard drives in RAID 0 striped at 16k. Now let's see what happens!

Sandra

Adaptec SCSI Benchmark

Hard Drive Tach

     Numbers like these really make you want to take a hammer to your IDE hard drives... Talk about breathtaking. I could sit here and ramble on forever, but I think 149,120kbytes/sec data transfer rate speaks for itself.

Where's the heat?

     SCSI hard drives, especially 15,000 rpm drives, are infamous for their intense heat build-up. However, these Cheetah hard drives produce very little heat, even when running at full speed for hours at a time. This does not mean they do not need to be cooled. As with any computer component, heat is the enemy so the cooler we can keep our hardware, the longer it will last. With a major investment like a SCSI hard drive, it is extremely important that you use some type of forced air cooling device mounted directly on the hard drive, or at least have cooling fans blowing across the hard drive racks.

Quick Links: Intro & Specs SCSI Benefits SCSI & RAID Basics 15K.3 Close-up Testing: Test System Testing: Single Drive Configuration Testing: RAID 0 Conclusion