7,200 to 10,000 to 15,000 RPM

What're the major differences between these three RPMs? And is it worth spending $115 on a 36.7 gb HD?
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Or is it worth paying $100 more for a 36.7gb 15,000 RPM?
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Both RPMs sound tempting, and it certainly seems like most people are wanting to switch to these HDs...

From personal experience, higher RPM drives only result in higher numbers on artificial benchmarks; real world applications almost never see any noticable performance or loading diffrence. Of course, this is just my experience so YMMV.

Also, why are you shopping a SATA drive and a SCSI drive? Remember to think about what type of connections you have availible and shop for reliability and budget.

What ARE you going to be doing with it also differs.

Don't forget if you get that expensive ass SCSI drive, you're going to need an Ultra320 controller to make full use of it. A quick look on Newegg shows a card that is around $120 or something but is PCI-X, something that standard desktop motherboards do not have at all.

It'd be like buying a $500 video card when all you can do is browse the web. Performance is there but you aren't/can't make the most of it.

The only good reasons to go SCSI are:
1.  Legacy.  You're already there.
2.  Really, REALLY heavy duty video/CG where you need every speed enhancment you can get.

Remember, the faster a drive spins, the more heat it makes AND the more noise.  I'm sitting next to 2 10k SCSI Ultras as I type this.  Trust me.

I don't do anything special on my computer, but I've noticed everyday stuff going much smoother with a high RPM drive.

If this is just for a desktop machine, I'd say to skip Ultra320 and go with a decent 7200 rpm UDMA or SATA drive. The seek times won't be as good, but for most desktoppy things you'll never notice (especially if you get a drive with a 8MB cache).

Also, keep in mind that, aside from things that need 15k RPM seek times, parallel SCSI is all but dead now; USB and FireWire (which both use the SCSI command set, incidentally) killed it. It'll most likely be completely dead once SAS (SCSI over SATA cabling) is out.

>>4
Also, it only makes sense to get a U320 card if you plan on having multiple U320-capable drives on the same bus; a single drive can saturate Ultra2 *if* you're lucky, and used U2 and U160 cards are easier to get.

Instead of buying an expensive "fast" hard drive, RAM prices are significantly dropping which makes a ramdisk a very feasible option.  Buy an extra gig of ram, partition that and run your OS on that drive.  Your performance will be much higher than if you use a slightly faster hard drive.

Uh... an interesting idea, and one that's been around for a long time. Just would like to point out the obvious:
a) RAM is volatile.
b) You'd have to do this every boot.

Maybe, just maybe, you should leave filesystem caching to the OS. It's a lot better at this than you are. Making a filesystem in RAM is a waste when using any decent OS, and is really only good in specialized circumstances where there are deadlines to meet.

>>5

I use my main computer to do video work, I only have SATA drives.  No problems.