On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Bill Cavalieri wrote:

> I had the same quandry last week, I have a server dishing out remote x 
> connections, and had 30 clients conntected.  With the ide drives the x 
> server came to a halt.  I looked at scsi and ide raid, after lots of 
> reading, and looking at the budget, I settled with an ide raid 
> controller from 3ware.
> 
> Its a  4 channel, hardware raid controller (more than just doing the xor 
> on card, like promise etc..), used 4 drives in raid 10, so I got 
> performance and security and a cost of drive space.  I know how 30 
> connected clients, and server is working just fine.

We've had good luck with the 3Ware controllers at work.  We built a
multi-TB front-end for our tape library using the 3Wares and IDE drives.  
We ran into one glitch: earlier firmware revs allow 7 250 GB drives on a
controller, but not 8.  As I recall, upgrading the firmware fixed the
problem.