Justin1091 wrote on 2020-09-30, 21:16:
Very interesting guys, thanks to you all for the insights! I'm going to try and find some rubber rings to put between the cage and the drive.
Another thing, I notice they're difficult to obtain, at least in my country and for reasonable prices. And the ones I do find usually have this 'server' SCA connector I once used at work with those caddies. I see some of you use 15K ones in PC's, do 15K drives exist with Molex power connectors? And is it possible to use a SCA one in a desktop PC, using some sort of converter (or convertor, heh)?
Yep. SCA-80 is nothing more than 68p wide SCSI combined with power and ID selector lines - so a simple passive adapter with a few jumpers for the ID works fine. There are definitely 68p 15k drives, but later in SCSI existence, they tended to be SCA, even in workstations.
What about U160 vs U320, think the difference is noticeable in say, starting up the PC and playing games? Or is it most noticeable for a fileserver for example.
Starting up and playing games involve random reads, and for those, seek times are far more important than throughput. In general, higher rotation speed give lower seek times, so a 15k drive on U2W (80MBps) would feel faster than a similar 10k driver on U320. That said, drives with U320 tend to be newer and newer drives tend to be faster (with lower seek times) regardless of rotation speed, so U320 15k probably beats U160 15k, all other things being equal - but it's a much smaller effect than rotation speed.
Note that SCSI is spectacularly backwards compatible, and with correct termination you can connect just about anything (except HVD drives/controllers - stay away from them unless you know what you're doing) to anything - as in you could use a U320 drive connected to an 8b narrow SCSI controller in a 5150, or a 10MB drive connected to a U320 RAID controller. Usually this is pretty nonsensical, and performance will suffer, but there can be cases where you might want to. If so, you almost certainly can.