Need some drive advice.

[Zepher]

I am looking at getting a new drive for my machine (the top on in my sig) and am looking for some tips.
First thing, let me list how my machine is currently set up.
C: is a 36gig SCSI Seagate Cheetah (system boot drive)
D: is a 36gig SCSI Seagate Cheetah
E: is a 400gig SATA Seagate
G: is a 60gig WD IDE drive
H: is a 160gig WD IDE drive
I: is a 200gig Maxtor IDE drive

I am looking at 3 drives,
a WD RE 320 with 8meg cache Sata 150 $125
a WD RE 250 with 16meg Cache Sata 150 $99
a WD SE 320 with 16meg Cache Sata 3.0gbs $125

the new drive will replace the 2 SCSI drives since they are the 1st generation 10K rpm Cheetahs and they seem kinda slow compared to the newer crop of IDE and SATA drives, as well as being kinda small.

Does 16meg of cache really make that much of a difference?
Will if be easy to get the computer to boot from the SATA drive?
Which of the 3 drives above would be best?

thanks.

 

[unhappy_mage]

The WD2500KS and WD3200KS are approximately as fast as each other, and they're the fastest non-raptor disks going, so far. Whichever is closer to your capacity needs will be a fine choice. The RE disks, though, may or may not have a raid-specific feature, TLER, which would be a bad choice for desktop use - they stop trying to recover errors after 7 or 8 seconds instead of continuing to try to recover. That's good for raid arrays, to avoid dropping a disk from an array, but for desktop use this is definitely non-ideal. So, my recommendation would be the last one listed, for speed, and recovering from errors in a good way.