Quote Originally Posted by 'wowphreak',index.php?page=Thread&postID=118854#po st118854
Last time I check usb 2.0 top theoretical thruput was 480Mbps.

if yeh check out http://techreport.com/articles.x/15433 yeh see an ssd drive with a thruput of 250MB/s
from the looks of http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...as,2004-6.html the fastest sas 15k drive read is 174 MB/s

So at this point the only thing that platter drives do better is in write speeds and storage space.
480 Megabits (Mb) per second is only 480 / 8 = 60 Megabytes (MB) per second. I'm not sure if you're implying USB 2.0 is 480 MB/s or 480 Mb/s, but there's a significant difference. If there weren't, people would have been using USB 2.0 for internal drive connections long before SATA, but that didn't happen because parallel ATA 66/100/133 is faster than USB 2.0.
Without a doubt, I'd take one relatively generic WD SE16 7200rpm drive (or other large capacity 7200rpm drive) and one MLC SSD (something comparable to OCZ Core) over multiple Raptors for multiboxing. I can't stress enough how important extremely low read access times and decent read transfer rate can be for eliminating the significant hard drive bottleneck in Shatt/AV. I'm working on getting a video capture card on a 2nd PC so I can capture video without having fraps affect performance.. then everyone can see the massive benefit of the SSD for hosting data. I've bought a lot of "experimental" computer components over the years for the sake of testing out breakthrough capabilities that either turned out to be a waste of money (SCSI scanner, Jaz Jet 1GB external disk drive, Bigfoot Killer NIC, Rambus memory) or a fantastic improvement over available technology (original Athlon and Core2, Voodoo2 SLI 3D cards, SSD for hosting data). I obviously have no regrets at all with the OCZ Core purchase, and I don't ever dread traveling to cities like I used to.

Regarding a post above, I listed in the original review post that I used 2.5"-> 3.5" laptop to standard hard drive brackets to mount the Core in my case. You could use any method though - an external laptop hard drive case, or securing the drive with rubber bands. With no moving parts, it's much more durable for mounting solutions than relatively fragile platter-based hard drives.

I still have *never* lost /follow since installing the SSD.