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I recently acquired an old Dell Poweredge 2400 system from my work and decided to compare this legendary SCSI RAID to my Serial ATA RAID. To be fair, the Perc2/Si controller is a full 2 generations behind what's current, but with four 15,000 RPM SCSI drives vs. the two 10,000 RPM SATA drives I was expecting a fair fight. The Perc2/Si also supports RAID 5 (parity) and RAID 10 (striped mirror) which my SIL3512 does not, so for an enterprise environment the setup I tested would be suicide (no redundancy on RAID 0). Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, on to the results:

RAID 0 (Striped)	NEUTRON SIL3512 SATA	Poweredge 2400 Perc2/Si SCSI
Burst	122.1 MB/s	51.7 MB/s
Average	113.9 MB/s	44.1 MB/s
Random	7.8ms	7.0ms
CPU	8%	2%

The Serial ATA almost tripled the burst rate and more than doubled the average of the SCSI. However, the random access was faster on the SCSI meaning my free Poweredge will be ideal for the upcoming LAN party (in addition to the fact that it has three 10/100 LAN ports). Aside from the disappointing benchmarks, it's friggin cool having a 4 drive SCSI RAID machine (6 if you count the RAID 1 OS container). It weighs over 80lbs and is louder than my furnace so LAN duty is probably all this machine will ever see, but you just can't beat the price! Finally, what you've all been patiently waiting for: the famous animated benchmark!