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BillyS - 4:25 pm on Feb 20, 2007 (gmt 0)
Today I own a Raptor and I'm getting a second one too. But I'd bet if I threw in that old (8 years old now...) SCSI it would still beat the Raptor. Anyway, I think it's unfair to say that Google uses cheap hardware. I'd rather we call it "inexpensive." For the cost of $800 on a SCSI drive, you could RAID a lot of inexpensive SATA drives. And at the scale Google has, their's probably a lot of ways to optimize the use of SATA drives.
Based on my old non-scientific experience SCSI drives are much faster than IDE drives. I had an older machine with two newer IDE drives an old SCSI drive. When backing up to both the spare IDE and SCSI drives at the same time, the SCSI always finished way ahead of the IDE.