Subject: Re: SCSI
From: Arthur Corliss (arthur@corlissfamily.org)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 22:38:29 AKDT
> I know SCSI in the old days was faster than IDE, but I've lost
> track....Is there still an advantage with SCSI? Now with IDE drives
> having caches and all....Are SCSI still something to be had?
SCSI blows the doors off of IDE for the most part. Keep in mind that IDE, for
all of the speed improvements, is still CPU intensive (bad CDR burns because
of CPU utilisation is rare on SCSI compared to IDE). Also keep in mind that
IDE drives are consumer-grade devices, and have no where near the MTBF of SCSI
devices. Oh, and that silly IDE limitation of two devices per controller?
The high end in SCSI has platter speeds of 15,000 RPMs (and has been available
for a couple of years, now). IDE typically trails SCSI in the RPM race (and
here, unlike MHz in CPUs, RPMs make a *huge* difference, especially for large
block transfers where your cache is useless). As a side note, does anyone
know what the fastest EIDE on the market is? Seems that market doesn't make
that big a deal of it like they do for SCSI.
If all you have in the machine is one drive, EIDE will work just fine in most
cases (since there's no other devices to contend with on the bus). But once
you start adding more devices, you'll get greater sustained throughput on SCSI.
----Arthur Corliss Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/ Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/ "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 23:27:44 AKDT