After reading the entire SCSI guide I realized that deciding which hard drive to buy wasn't that easy..

I'm pretty much stuck with two choices. One is Maxtor Diamondmax 80gb with an average of 8.0ms seek time and 2mb of cache. On the other hand the Wester Digital WD800JB has a large 8mb cache but it's seek time is pretty high, 9.7ms.
(Got those values from storagereview.com)

I'll use one of these two as a boot drive. Which one should I choose?

Or do you recommend another drive?

I realize they're just IDE, but after you emphasized seek times so much I though maybe 1ms would make a difference

I think I'll go with SCSI after all as an upgrade since the system I'm building is already too expensive.

Thanks for the advice tho..

I agree. They are relatively cheap ($220 at newegg) but with the controller they cost about $400. So yeah they're not for everyone, as you said..

I'm wondering what will happen with serial IDE interfaces though. They're still trying to make things faster and faster while leaving the seek times as they are. It's kinda sad.

By the way thanks for all the information you're sharing with people on this site, just discovered it Very informative and objective.