What makes you a geek?

[Lissa]

I am reasonably familiar with SAS and I have been following prices of SAS controllers for a while. My motherboard has only four PCIe slots and there is one left. Whether something could be crammed in there is another question. But, no, the Seagate person and I were talking about the same thing. I'm sorry if my paraphrase of what he said was confusing. What he actually said was "Nobody is making SCSI!" (Meaning U320.) This was someone at their presales support.

In an ideal world I would just get a SAS controller and a drive or three. But I can hardly afford another drive, let alone a controller. I was hoping to get another U320 for installing Windows 7.

And actually U320 is still faster than 3 GHz SAS, not slower, at least with a single drive. U320 is 2560 Mbits/sec, 3 GHz SAS is only 2400 Mbits/sec. Albeit the bandwidth of U320 is shared among all the drives on the bus.

You can still pick up U320 drives (along with U160) from places like NewEgg, TigerDirect, and the large list of retailers on PriceWatch. While Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, and others may not be producing U320 drives, there are quite a few still out on the market (both OEM and Retail). You can also find them in 68 pin, 80 pin, and LVD connections.

IMO though, SSDs are going to be the way to go once the price drops on them, right now you're paying prices on SSDs like what you would find about a decade ago on IDE hard drives, about $2.50 to $3 a Gig.