[lazytown]

I've done fairly extensive research on the 10K SATA 150MB Raptors vs 10K or 15K SCSI for database purposes.. Basically the Raptors perform much better than any other IDE/SATA drive out there, but the SCSI drives perform much better than the Raptors. So it's like the Raptors get you about 40% of the way to SCSI but you will still suffer. Especially with a lot of small reads. Now if you go to 15K SCSI there is no comparison.

I use RAID5, but I am going to use RAID10 on any future setups. It is also is smart to have a secondary drive outside the RAID array for backups or log files. By using a secondary drive for backup creation, I cut my backup time by about half (and cut it to 1/4 by using incremental backups without compression instead of compressed files). So it went from 4 hours to less than 1 hour. This is useful even if you store your backups off-server (as you should) since the backup creation still usually occurs locally before it is FTP'd off somewhere.

-vissa