Just as a quick note on the server drives: Has anybody recorded the temperatures these things are reporting? The most modern server-grade stuff is really good up to about 80F or so (ambient), at which point you really do need to start cooling them. And that's with the number and strength of fans in a server, which doesn't care about how loud it is because you typically seal them in an environmentally controlled room.
Most 68k Macs just don't have the kind of cooling to support 10/15k server disks. (being smaller boxes and boxes designed for less airflow than a server.)
Plus, as Trash80toHP_Mini pointed out, you
must buy an outboard SCSI adapter to take advantage of even a morsel of the performance these disks have to offer. Apple never shipped very fast SCSI controllers and something like the CF AztecMonster adapter should be just about able to saturate the SCSI buses of everything up through the beige G3. (The beige G3 has fans, it may be able to support
one 10k-disk.)
One of the things that has been discussed in the IRC channel lately is whether or not the AztecMonster is "worth it" when you can get the SCSI2SD for less money. The question is how you balance disk performance and your budget, because the AztecMonster is technically a better product that's faster, but Classic Mac OS (I'd argue all the way out through OS 9.2 for many workloads) is a lot less sensitive to disk performance than, say, Mac OS X is today.
For two reasons:
- You're unlikely to be waiting on a Mac OS 9 or older computer to do your day job.
- If you have enough RAM you're probably almost never swapping anyway, and Mac OS 9 doesn't randomly hit the disk for caching operations anyway.
So, basically you can afford to wait and and it's not like you were using the disk like RAM anyway -- places where putting some SSD chips directly onto the PCIe bus in the newest MacBook Airs made a lot of sense.
I'm personally likely to buy an AztecMonster in the near to mid-range future. My PowerMac 6100 and PowerBook 180 aren't really the ones that "need" it but I want to get my Sun Voyager going a little bit more quietly, and I figure eventually I'll have to open it to fix up the display inverter, etc. OpenSTEP is a little harder on the disk than classic Mac OS is, and this machine is a little bit more difficult to open up than the 6100 (and even the PB180) are.
I consider myself fortunate in that the disks I have now are in pretty good working order, but I definitely store all of my actual data from the PB180 and my PM6100 on a network file server.
When those disks die, I'll be looking at SCSI2SD and AztecMonster as the replacements. The neat things about those solutions is that if you buy a 2 gig CF card and put it away until you need to replace your flash media again.
CF/SD media will essentially "keep" forever (whereas a spinning hard disk may actually fail in storage, until something really bad happens to it physically (or, say, ESD damage) or until you write to it a certain number of times. More and more modern SD/CF media is getting better at the write cycle thing too. (And of course normal SATA SSD grade flash media is getting to the point where you could write to it at full effort for 50 years and not wear it out.)
The fact that hard disks can fail in storage is one of the reasons many people consider tape and optical media where the data storage media is separated from the read/write heads to be a more robust solution for backup/recovery and archival than hard disks. Even expensive ruggedized hard disks such as RDX cartridges.
