SCSI vs. SATA in real life situation

Planning to upgrade DC servers. Running AD, file sharing, routing and remote acess, and exchange.
problem is company budget is very low. Will this exchange server do the job efficiently with SATA drive? even for dial-in users? Or should I go with SCSI on this server but swallow the space limitation?
Does anyone have real-life experience with this? The server handles about 35 LAN clients and 10 Dial-up users at anypoint.

 

Good question.

Hard drives today can only reach 80 MB/s so SATA at 160MB/s and SCSI at 320 MB/s are entirely sufficient.

SCSI drives are more expensive than their SATA cousins.

Both types of drives can have RAID BUT I have only seen SCSI drives available in a hot swap configuration.

So, if I was most concerned with up-time I would go with SCSI ULTRA drives at 10,000 RPM in a RAID configuration using hot swappable drives.

 

So, in real-life, not in spec sheet or theory, do you think raid makes it run faster?
Don't worry about redundency or safety masures. I'm quite aware, mostly concerned of speed right now.

 

The simple answer is RAID will not increase the drives performance. The basic intention of RAID was for redundency. There are methods used in RAID arrays that will almost mimic the performance of standalone drives, like read ahead, write cache, etc.

So if ts performance you are after get the best disk controller you can afford, a hard drive with the most heads, some drive cache and high RPM.