What makes you a geek?

[Lissa]

Speed of interfaces is largely irrelevant when the internal transfer rate of the drives is well under half the theoretical max of the interface. There are only two times transfer rate of the interface matters:
1) the data is stored in the hard drive's cache (very rare)
2) you are using a solid state drive (very expensive)

I used to use 15k RPM SCSI drives (I ended up getting them free, just had to buy the controller... I work for a manufacturer) But SCSI / SAS for home users is pretty much dead now. The storage geek home of the now and future is:
1) large network attached storage (multiple SATA, mirroring for reliability) for large files (video, music, etc..)
- It's cheaper to get 3 SATA drives and mirror them than a single comparably sized SAS drive plus controller. Reliability of SAS > SATA, however, reliability of 3 mirrored SATA > SAS.
- These types of files are largely not speed sensitive in a home environment, so speed benefits of SAS are minimal.
- Also serve as backup location for client machines (mom, dad, and kids' computers)

2) local drives, if you want fast, will be solid state drives. With large files on the NAS, the client machines can have relatively small HDs and the latency advantages of solid state drives far outweighs the advantages of SAS drives. These can be run on SATA, so you can appropriate budget from a SAS controller to the additional cost of the solid state drive.

Just my opinion.

And yeah, some of that is why I'm a geek. Some of it is the D&D1 books I have tucked away, and some of it is that I build and test my own home speakers.

Yeah, I'm looking at setting up another game machine now for the next few years (sans video cards as those usually get updated every two years or so) and really like the speeds that SSDs provide, but paying $2.50 to $3 a Gig is kinda harsh considering you can pick up SATA drives and put them in a RAID 0 and get pretty high speeds while spending about $1 per 5 to 6 G (about a factor of 10 to 15 less for a little bit of speed loss). The only other problem with SSDs right now is that you have a limited number of writes before you pretty much lose the use of the SSD (which isn't bad if you don't plan to make many writes, but system drives tend to have a lot of writing going on, so that lowers the life expectancy of the SSD).

SSDs probably have another couple years of maturity to go before they start looking really attractive to replace spindle HDDs.