1. The top end disks are re-jigged SCSI disks, and can act more asynchronously given the right drivers ( getting further away from IDE), as Delio said. They also tend to spin faster - up to 15,000rpm.
The only commonly sold SATA disks I see are 7200rpm, not having checked many suppliers. Would a 15000rpm SATA disk be cheaper than a 15000rpm SCSI one?
This may be a bit late but hope it helps
I havent herd of 15000rpm sata disks yet. But western digital do make 10000rpm sata disks.
I read an article in a magazine (PC user or APC cant remember which) about these
they did some comparisons between sata drives, ata drives and scsi drives.
The end result was basically the 7200rpm had similar speeds with the sata ones
being slightly faster.
With the 1000rpm drives it was a similar storey with the sata drives aproaching
the speeds of the scsi ones.
The point they did make about the 10000rpms sata drives was that they were
cheaper than the scsi ones for not much of a perfomance drop.
Note from that same magazine: It also said that the only ones making the
10000rpm sata disk are western digital and that the 10000rpm disks are based
on scsi disks.
Prices probably arnt the cheapest but have a look here http://www.ascent.co.nz/mn-product-template.asp?cname=Hard+drives for comparisons, the western digital ones are down the bottom
Brendan Greer
