SATA 150 Raid 0/1, Hard drive choice

[Rhyth]

I'm looking for a 160Gb+ hard drive thats quiet and fast.
My AA8 supports a SATA Matrix RAID

* Four ports SATA 150 RAID 0/1, deliver higher performance and data protection
* Supports SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing and native hot plug

I'm assuming this means SATA 300 is a no no? What I really want is a Samsung spin point as I've heard they are super quiet and a good speed but couldnt see one supporting SATA 150. Could someone tell me if SATA 150 supports SATA 300 rated hard drives, and maybe suggest a good choice for me please.

[Splash]

AFAIK a SATA 300 drive attached to a SATA150 controller will simply run at SATA150 speeds. And if you're going for an array of that size with any form of striping please make sure you either have mirroring too, or damn good regular backups.

The spinpoints are nice though.

[Rhyth]

thanks for the advice Slash, consider it heeded

[aidanjt]

Hotplugging support depends entirely on the controller, the disks themselves obay controller commands, if that includes 'turn off', it'll do that no matter what state the rest of the system is in.

3ware does the best SATA RAID cards in the business, entirely hardware operated arrays, hotplug support, command queuing support. They aren't cheap however.

As for preference of hard drives, there's not much worth talking about in the 7200RPM field that makes disk X better than disk Y. Samsung is as good as any, they don't offer huge capacities, but fairly silent and reasonablely priced.

[directhex]

3ware does the best SATA RAID cards in the business, entirely hardware operated arrays, hotplug support, command queuing support. They aren't cheap however.

3ware are certainly good, and well-respected in certain user groups, but don't discount other optiosn at this end of the pricing scale - such as Intel, Arcea, or LSI

[aidanjt]

3ware are certainly good, and well-respected in certain user groups, but don't discount other optiosn at this end of the pricing scale - such as Intel, Arcea, or LSI

Agreed, even my Intel ICH5R has great performance. Not much good for Linux, but still performs admirably.