Yeah, you do have to trade off performance, safety and price, and that depends. With an unlimited budget (hah!), a need to maximize performance and an utter lack of fear of losing data, a SCSI RAID-0 arrangement would make the most sense. But lose the unlimited budget, and the increasingly good performance (and much better prices) of IDE drives starts to complicate matters. The last time I looked, you could put together an 90-or-so gig SCSI RAID-0 package for something like ten grand (using 18 9-gig RAID hard drives, which seemed to have the best price point per megabyte at the time, at about $50 per gig. Plus, of course the cost of the controllers. RAID controllers aren't cheap. You can buy, just to pick a decent brand, a 40-gig IBM DeskStar for less than a hundred each, and do the RAID-0 array for less $200 (okay, you only get 80 gig instead of the ninety -- make it a three-disk array, and you're at 120 gig for less than $300), or double up, run a RAID 0+1 array of four IBM 60-gig drives for $600, plus a much cheaper controller. Will you get better performance out of the SCSI system? Sure. How much better? I dunno. Hell, set up a four-disk IDE RAID-system, and stripe the RAID-0 partition across all four, and you might well beat the SCSI system.