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Hardware

A Look At the Fastest IDE Drive Yet 173

Posted by Hemos from the for-all-your-pr0n! dept.
muks writes "Here's an article on Tom's Hardware about IBM's Deskstar 75GXP. It has some good points on why we still need UltraATA/66 and faster IDE interfaces while hard drive transfer rates don't keep up. "
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A Look At the Fastest IDE Drive Yet More

A Look At the Fastest IDE Drive Yet

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  • The Tom's Hardware review [tomshardware.com] of the Asus CUBX [asus.com] indicates that it has 2 IDE controllers [tomshardware.com]. This means, of course, 2 primary and 2 secondary (with 2 devices on each, for a total of 8) connections!

    Yes, this is an older design (Tom reviewed it in May), and it's based on the 440BX chipset. Asus apparently got around the "no ATA/66 on 440BX" by using a different chipset for the controller -- and put in two of them for good measure!! Cool.

    I haven't looked around much, but with the proliferation of IDE/ATAPI Zip drives, DVD drives, CD-RW drives, and the incredible availability of cheap hard drives, I have to think this idea [of multiple IDE controllers] is going to stick around. Other motherboard manufacturers should get the clue very soon, if they haven't already.

  • Trying to make a scsi cdrom, burner, hard drive(s), and other goodies from different manufactuters work and boot Windows was hell on earth

    Dare I suggest that the software was your problem? I've never understood how CD-Rs are supported in WinNT. It seems like you install one, and windows creates a bunch of drive letters for it. Then if you actually want to burn, your burning software has to grab the device some other way. Ugh.

    In Linux, I've never had the first problem with disks, scanners, cdrom, cd-rw, and the rest competing. I've had devices that just weren't supported properly, but that never had the effect of destabilizing the entre bus.

  • Well, on my home PC, I have a DVD drive, a CDRW, a nd 13GB, 5GB, and 20GB hard drives. I just bought a Promise UDMA66 controller, and off I went!

    (Sure, I had to install a card in my IRQ-depleted box, but I would have had to do the same to get SCSI. It just would have cost a LOT more, and been way harder to set up.)
  • Use both to your advantage. You'll love the system speed of SCSI for what really counts, and the savings of IDE for what's a little less important.

    Thank you! I was getting worried that nobody else had noticed this incredibly sensible idea.

  • along with "Who needs more than 640K RAM?"

    BTW, have you tried a 20 minute short movie piece on a system with 17+30GB HD? Things get squeezed really fast. We're getting a 120GB RAID 0 array, and I'm already wondering when that won't be enough.

    Frank.

  • Yes, we've gone through three powers since I've been computing. I still remember when a 75 Meg would have been huge.

    Frightening, no? I remember thinking I was ripping off the vendor when I bought a 420 MB IDE drive for $300. Under a buck per meg, I was in heaven...
    --

  • Hard drives like these would REALLY increase performance in my best-selling games.
  • you can buy five (5) Seagate Barracuda 9LP drives for a total of $77.50
    Those drives have a reserve price set, and it's at least US$46. I don't know what those drives will go for, but based on past EBay auctions for those drives, I'd guess they'll go for $50 - $100 each.
    So -- a total of $300 for 36GB of 4+1 RAID 5, sans controller, case and power.
  • The Abit KA7-100 motherboard has onboard IDE RAID support for raid 0,1, and 5. It also supports ATA/100 drives
  • Great, now what do I do with my 1 meg tandy drive?

  • Has anyone noticed that back-up devices have always exceeded hard drive capacities by at least a factor of 2, but now with the new 75GB storage, you'll need at least 2 tapes to back-up everything.

  • > This weekend I ditched my Ultra/ATA drives, and replaced them with 6 year old Seagate Barracuda
    > 4s. End result? Star office now loads in _9_ seconds as opposed to 30.

    While no-one disagrees with the SCSI speed figures, this is a little hard to believe. A three-fold improvement with 6 year old technology--I don't think so. May I suggest that your IDE drives were hopelessly fragmented?

    As an illustration, after a clean install of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 on a dual Celeron, Word started in a little over one second. A few weeks--and several software installations and much cluster mangling--later, this same machine took considerably longer to load Word. It's not just what you have, it's how you use it.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • The sad thing is most operating systems don't take advantage of some of the features of SCSI. For example tag queuing is not taken advantage of in most operating systems. Windows 95 never sends a queued command and NT never really uses much queuing (less than 4 outstanding commands at most that I have seen in a bus trace) and if you think Linux does, think again. I looked at one device driver that only supported one outstanding command per initiator and some other UN*X's are not much better.
    NT supposedly supports at least 128 outstanding SCSI commands, but you have to mung something in the registry. I did some hacking on Solaris a few years back, in the context of the great "elevator scheduling debate" on linux-fsdev, to measure a few of my theories about disk scheduling. I wrote my own block scheduler, and I found that, just as you say, there really weren't ever very many outstanding commands. But it wasn't because of any limitation of the driver -- it was because the OS wasn't presenting enough workload to the driver. The net was that Solaris' solution was quite good enough, even though it looks dumb on the surface.
    I wouldn't be so quick to blame the NT device driver for the fact that you only saw four outstanding commands on the bus. You just might not have had enough processes running (or maybe you didn't know about munging the registry, cuz the documentation is well hidden.)
  • Your facts are a little crooked there. A RAID of five 9 GB drives could have a capacity ranging from 9 GB (bizarre 5-way redundancy), to 45 GB (no redunancy, but very fast). My point still stands: you can used SCSI equipment with the same or higher capacity and vastly superior performance, for the same price as a new ATA drive.
  • What about drives? Drives report geometry in 3D anyway. You'd have to change the firmware of all drives, or implement similar kludges in all new harddrives. In the end, it is probably too much work for too little gain.
  • 3. Did I mention that a UW SCSI bus can have 15 targets

    The IDE approach has always been to have multiple cheap channels rather than an expensive single do-everything channel. A cheapo i815 chipset comes with two 100Mbyte/sec channels - that's already more aggregate bandwidth than your modern 160MByte/sec SCSI channel which likely cost more than that whole i815 motherboard. Look for >2 channels to become common when SerialATA hits the settles.

    4. Disconnect.

    AFAIK IDE has supported SCSI style disconnection since ATA/66. Operating system support is the problem.

    plus, the better drives are always out for SCSI first

    /me glances at www.storage.ibm.com [ibm.com]. Not from where I'm standing lad. OK. You got me on the 10,000rpm drives, but I'll take 75GB 7200rpm any day - the data transfer rates seem comparable.

    Paul.
  • Has anyone used a solid-state(RAM, no disc) drive... I know they're a little bit pricy ($39K for a 1,6GB unit), but they're are supposed to be screaming fast (It's RAM, access time measured in nanosecs. :) )

  • Actually, I'm using Win98 on an AMD K6-3. I think you can fit dumb terminal / timesharing support on a floppy, OK? Please don't get condecending, I wasn't trying to be.

    I actually code in Windows using a "Studio" like app, but that's assembly code for PIC microchips, the reason I'm in Windows, I don't know how to develop for PIC in Linux, much less burn the chips. I also do IE 5.0 quite regularly, I just don't have the patience to download anything that isn't on a local CD.

    If one is doing the high bandwidth video editing, I would assume that it would have to be SCSI to be acceptable in latency and bandwidth. Maybe use IDE for secondary storage once everything is properly captured.
  • The TRS-80 Model 1 cassetes were loaded/saved at 500 baud, not 300. Later, the Model 3 added an option to operate the tape at 1500 baud.

    The Atari 400/800 accessed its tape drive at 600 baud.
  • Not really. If you haven't got enough RAM, a hard-drive twice as fast wouldn't improve performance. What really improves, however, is general usage. For example, when I upgraded to my Matrox 20giger (the previous fastest harddrive before the IBM) from my old 6.4 GB one, Quake didn't run any faster, but stuff like recompiling X or the kernel, unzipping tar files, starting up, etc, all became much faster.

  • back in my day (Score:5)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @01:13PM (#838996) Homepage
    we didn't have these fancy namby pampy hard drives. We had cassete tape recorders to load and save programs.. And we liked it..

    Now I feel old.
  • Er, I think you put in an extra power of two.

    Two controllers, each controlling one master and one slave, makes a total of four.

    --
  • Most of A-bit's mobos have 4 ide ports for a total of 8 possible drives. Because they use the bx chipset which only supports ata33 so they glue on a highpoint hotrod 66.
  • 75 Gig hard drives! (I feel really old, sometimes.)

    Yeah, I remember reading (not that long ago, I thought) about how 1 gig drives were coming out soon (at the time I think I had 200 megs). At the time, I though "In a few years, that'll seem tiny". I guess I was right, though 80 gigs really does seem excessive, at least for right now.

  • I used to be a SCSI bigot but I could not justify the difference in price for desktop machines.

    A typical example:

    Quantum Fireball lct10 20.4GB EIDE, price $99

    Quantum Atlas III 18.2GB Ultra Wide SCSI hard disk, price $269

    Before someone pulls out the respective spec sheets for each drive and starts quoting MTBF numbers and data transfer rates, let's look at the big picture here:

    The average user - heck, even the power user, is not going to see much of a difference between these drives in day-to-day use. Yet the SCSI drive is > 2.5x the price of the EIDE drive.

    SCSI is a mature technology. Even EIDE drives use the SCSI command set over the EIDE bus. So WHY do we still see these huge price differences?

  • What about "Firewire" (IEEE 1394)? I'm not that much of an expert, does it fit the bill? Is it still too expensive?

    It's definitly fast enough, 200 Mbits/sec IIRC. The main problem is driver support (at least on Linux, I think Win98/2K is doing alright with it). I'm working on supporting IEEE 1394 cameras into a vision program this summer, and it requires a kernel patch and a couple of alpha-quality user space libraries to do _anything_. People are working on disk support, and IPv4 over 1394, but, again, very alpha.

    It's also pretty expensive, I think. More so thank SCSI, even.
  • Remember when everyone thought, "I'll never fill up 2 gigs!"? It's funny you don't hear that so much anymore.

    Now a days, it's like, "When's that 13 gig double-sided rewritable dvd coming out? I'm running out of space!"

    Ahh, the beauty of digital media...
  • Excessive? Not in the least. I digitized about 40 gigs worth of video last night. 80 gigs is just about what I need right now, but it won't be enough in about six months...maybe less.
  • Ecrix rocks.
    The 33/66 GB tapes are pricey, but they should last forever ... as the tape does not backhitch (rewind due to lack of data in the stream).
    6 MB/sec uncompressed is zippy.
    Available in a U2W LVD external config - nice when you decide that one tape drive just won't do, and you want to chain 2 or more for your overall network backup solution.
  • I hate to nitpick, but if there's no redundancy, it's more of an AID than a RAID, isn't it? :)
  • There is so much $$ being pumped into IDE right now that it will surely surpass scsi in the near future.

    See how it works? Simple.

  • Another big plus to having lots of little SCSI drives is that if one goes bad, it can be replaced with only a few gigs of data lost (unless if you keep backups on different drives like I do). If your 80GB IDE drive goes bad, you've got a major problem. If it's just bad sectors, you can partition in so that the bad cylender isn't being used (I've done it, and it's a pain), but if it stops spinning up, that's a major investment gone. I've noticed that SCSI drives tend to be better made, and I've never seen bad sectors show up (which means they probably allocate more space to fixing them). I still use my IDE drives to store mp3's, but 4GB SCSI3 is plenty for me to play with.

  • An 80MB/s SCSI channel isn't that expensive (heck, 40MB UW SCSI tends to easily outperform ATA/66), and until people write the full drivers for the hardware, well... SCSI has had disconnect for how many years now?

    Actually, the 75GB drive was out in SCSI first (it might have been 72GB, but the same tech otherwise)... months earlier...

    --
  • Look, SCSI does this too. To the BIOS, the linier SCSI drive is mapped into the 3D geometry, and mapped back into linier by the OS. In fact, I think IDE drives these days do that too. Also, there is nothing wrong with IDE. Sure it is popular to curse IDE, but if you do, you're not using it right. With the advent of UltraDMA, IDE drives have as low a CPU usage as SCSI drives, and with UDMA100, IDE drives have more bandwidth than all but Ultra160SCSI and FibreChannel. IDE drives still have lower TPS, but on a desktop machine, that really doesn't matter. This is proven by the new IDE drives (like the 75GXP.) The 75GXP actually performs as fast as some 10,000RPM SCSI drives on the outer tracks. IDE really isn't a bottle neck in this situation.
  • If you're looking for good tools, you might check out personalStudio [adamation.com], a video editing program for BeOS. It's ridiculously cheap - you can get a bundle with the software, BeOS Pro edition, AND a 1394 video capture card (which has drivers for BeOS of course) & cable for like $129 US. I think you can even run BeOS on that laptop, though laptops aren't officially supported....

    Sponge
  • I've got a question that's probably going to sound kinda stupid, but since I don't know the issues at present...

    Can SCSI's full bandwidth capacity be dumped on a PC's internal bus without a bottleneck? My admittedly addled brain tells me that there's no point in hooking up a SCSI controller to the PCI bus as the PCI bus would be limiting the performance. And from what I've heard, even on-board controllers are simply hardwired to the PCI bus, so there's no advantage there. Can anyone inform me differently on this?


    --Fesh
    "Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy

  • It's called UDMA66, my friend.. =] (Score:3)

    by gothic ( 64149 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @04:31PM (#839012)
    UDMA66 can have 4 devices per port. So, 8 devices on a standard system. Now, if they would just put more ports on a board, so overhead per chain stays fairly low, that'd be nice.
    Or even a more wild dream: Make CPUs more efficent, instead of just faster.. Naa, never happen.. =]

  • Mother McRee.. (Score:4)

    by Nanookanano ( 213568 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @12:32PM (#839013)
    75 Gig hard drives! (I feel really old, sometimes.)
  • WHAT? maybe in the early 80s, but today there is no difference in platters for ide or scsi or sca or whatever, the sole difference is in the electronics board screwed to the back of the case, and actually only about half of that board is different, the part for motor control and power management is the same.

    That being the case, there probably is no internal difference between (for example) a $200 40gig IDE drive and a $200 15gig SCSI drive, as the things that the electronics do with the media will be different. The platters/heads/etc. would be the same in either case, causing a 15gig SCSI drive to look more expensive than an 15gig IDE drive because you're judging on capacity alone. The area density problem he pointed out sounds valid to me. Doesn't mean that's a good thing though, but on the other hand, lower data density on a media that can do better is good from a reliability standpoint.


    --Fesh
    "Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy

  • The scsi drives have come down dramatically in pricing, it's just that the IDE drives have dropped even faster... remember that a couple more ASICs and a smarter design team do add some cost, but you are right - not all of it is justified.

    --

  • Why so many complaints about IDE? (Score:3)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @04:32PM (#839016)
    Complaints about an obsolete, bottlenecking technology on /.? Increadible? When somone says "X should DIE!" People say "what for, it works!" When people say "IDE should DIE!" people say "YEAH!"

    PS> X should DIE!
  • Do you know how many 30 gig drives you can buy for the price of a reliable scsi tape system and tapes?

    I use those removable drive bays for IDE. I even set up a computer user that can't read well (dyslexic) with this setup & he loves it. He has 4 drives & backs up & swaps between them. He's fearless because anytime he totally hoses his system, (like installing a new version of Quicken) NO PROBLEMO, pop in the old drive.

    I'm gonna buy a kt7-raid motherboard [abit-usa.com] as soon as I can get one locally. Check it out: 4 ide connectors ON board, & IDE Raid to boot! here's the solution: mount 1 hard disk each on the raid channels, then pile on the removable backup HD, bulk storage HD, DVD & rewriteable CD on the slower channels.

  • You are correct, cheap SCSI stuff is out there, but you have to buy signifigantly back in the curve to get it. So far back that current generation IDE implementations kick SCSI's ass at the same price point.
  • True - my 10krpm IBM drive is louder than my other drives... but heck, I had that when IDE was still at 33MB/s (cough) and 7200 was just coming out. Even the fast drives are quieter than they used to be, but do you want performance or quiet? I've got several 7200 and one 10k drive in my main box, and only the seeks are loud - the fans on the case are far more noisy than the drives. My quiet ATA/66 drive (14GB, 7200rpm) can't even begin to keep up, even though it is over a year newer than the 10k, and two years newer than the 7200 SCSIs... and it is among the top IDE performers.

    Add some carpet, or put the computer in a different room (or get a new SO ;-D)
    --
  • SCSI is better in every way imaginable, and if I could afford it, I'd use it. But I can't afford it.

    When I'm spending somebody else's money, though, I always use SCSI.
  • >Didn't you hear? SCSI is dying.

    >You don't even belong in this discussion topic if you're just going to rant about SCSI and other dead or dying interfaces. Shouldn't you be upgrading to FireWire instead of staying mired in the 80's?

    Right (with Ultra 320 on the way)... show me a reasonably priced firewire internal card (supported by major OSs) and competetive drives...

    The external firewire drives have a 1394=>IDE kludge and suck even more...

    FiberChannel... maybe that's what you meant.
    --
  • ...which posted the results months earlier.

  • Bah! I've seen README file larger than the memory in my first computer. I've seen comment blocks larger than the memory in my first computer. Many, many computers today have larger block sizes on their hard drives than my first computer's entire memory. What's really scary is that my first hard drive wasn't large enough to hold the entire current source code for the Linux kernel- gzipped.

  • CD-R's are supported in windows NT through the ASPI layer. (its similar to the raw scsi support in linux) and dare I say that windows actually has nothing to do with your scsi bus "destabilizing" its the drivers that probably needed to be updated..
  • Half an hour or so of Live Goat Porn in mpeg format takes up about 600 MB. It doesn't take a lot of goat porn to fill up a huge hard drive. And I want my goat porn in digital format because trying to find the right tape is such a pain in the ass. And don't even think of suggesting that goat porn should be kept in a much smaller format like RM -- you just don't get all the subtleties with that crappy format.
  • Please note, I did not say "master and slave," I said "primary and secondary" (as in IDE channels).

    The 'normal' IDE controllers, like the ones sitting in my humble little PII/300 right now, are dual-channel. Each IDE controller can access 4 devices. Then Asus went and added another one, for another 4 devices.

    From Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com]:

    • "As you know, the BX chipset itself does not support UltraDMA/66. Even so, Asus integrated an additional UltraDMA/66 IDE controller chip from CMD, adding two IDE channels. Thanks to this, the CUBX comes with a total of four IDE ports (allowing up to eight drives)."
    I trust this clears things up? (Yes, I know I said ATA/66 instead of UltraDMA/66 in my original post. I switched the terms, sorry.)
  • 9. CPU utilization (much better than ATA DMA)

    This is the one that has sold me on using SCSI on my next system. I 'mv'ed about 500 megs of files from one partition to another on my desktop box (IDE, of course), and mv took up about 3/4 of the CPU for 5 minutes. My workstation (which is SCSI) does stuff like that in maybe 30 seconds, with no noticable slowdown in my other programs.

  • SCSI, hands down!

    My home machine is all SCSI, all the time. I'm using a Mylex/BusLogic BT-958 controller (does Ultra 2 Wide). On the internal bus, I've got two Seacrate 4G drives, an IBM 8G drive, and a Plextor 40X CD-ROM. These are connected together using a 68-pin twisted-pair cable. On the external bus, I have a Castlewood ORB drive (if you've got one of these, download the v3.0 SCSI firmware now!), connected using a 68-pin shielded cable. I used to get occasional bus lockups, but once I replaced the Toshiba CD-ROM drive with the Plextor, they went away.

    My laptop (HP Omnibook 800CT) has built-in NCR/Symbios SCSI controller. It rocks.

    The IDE controller in my home desktop machine is unused, and will remain that way. IDE sucks. Always has.

    The reason I insist on SCSI is mostly because I've been a SCSI wonk since my Amiga days. Sticking with SCSI lets me use all my old drives (and get the data off them!). All the old drives still work, including a really massive 5.25" full-height 600M drive from HP that needs a power supply all to itself just to spin up. Being able to get at all these drives, both on the desktop machine and the laptop, is insanely useful.

    It wasn't so long ago that SCSI and IDE drive prices were at near parity. The SCSI drive had maybe a $10 premium over its IDE counterpart. But now you can expect to pay up to 50% more for a SCSI drive. This is clearly opportunism on the manufacturers' part, as the electronics aren't sufficiently different to warrant such a price disparity. They're simply soaking the server market.

    Grr, I say, grr...

    Schwab

  • Nowadays, most folks have at least two CD type drives (a burner, a reader, a DVD, etc.), maybe an IDE tape, at least a couple of hard drives, and not enough money to go SCSI on everything.

    The compromise that I took a few months ago when I built my x86 box was to use SCSI for everything except hard disks. SCSI DVD, SCSI Zip, SCSI tape. This stuff isn't really too much more expensive than the IDE counterparts. Then for hard disks, since I really cared about capacity more than speed (this x86 box is my jukebox, not a 100-user database server) I went with IDE. That's where the biggest $ difference is, so I compromised and ended up with a $2500 box instead of a $3500 box.

    I used to buy SCSI exclusively on my Amiga, but the price gap is just getting wider, so even on the Amiga I wimped out and got an IDE adapter. I still use my old DMA SCSI disks for the intense stuff, and now cheap PIO IDE for the large sequential stuff. Put things in the right places, and you almost can't tell that there's any PIO disk access going on.

    If IDE is that bad off, let's quit using it

    Ain't gonna happen. It's "good enough" for most people. Even reactionary Amiga crackpots like me are giving in and buying it. And as long as people buy it, it will be there.

    What I don't understand is why companies like IBM bother to try making high performance IDE drives. Anybody who really needs performance isn't going to buy one of those anyway.


    ---
  • "no ATA/66 on 440BX" is unimportant to me, that's what scsi is for :) I'm just waiting for someone to get around "No AGP4x on BX".... or even better, SMP T-Birds...

    All i ask for is the absolute best of everything with support for everything in one product with an extremely compact design yet limitless expansion capability, and for very little money... is that really too much?


    Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
    Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
  • haha you really think someone is going to go to all that trouble just to email you? :) I am not trying to be a dick, but really.

    Actually, I've gotten a few emails from people who have decoded it. And some AC made it a joke for a while to repsond to my posts with the decoded address.

    Anyway, it amuses me to have it, so who cares. I've actually considered encoding

    thisis@notareal.email.com

    and using that, just to really mess with people. But I'm not that evil... usually.
  • That's the fun part. The manufactors like to play games. Some say you can put on 4 buses with 2 devices each. Others will claim you can put 4 devices on the 2 busses.
    The big problem is the chipset of the motherboard. Does it support the 4 devices per bus? Does it supply enough voltage? I think that's why you are seeing that with your 66 Controller. Check out some of the Promise controllers. They are more then happy to have 8 devices from what I hear.
    Hope that helps you. It basicly boils down to how the mobo/chipset maker designed the chips.
  • I've got 3 cd drives, 4 hard drives, and a zip drive.

    IDE is great, especially ATA.
    SCSI is better.
    IDE is CHEAP, SCSI is not.

    I love SCSI, I love IDE. I will buy IDE because of the price. My only gripe with IDE is the number of devices on your typical mobo. thats it.

    Other then that, IDE is better because it's so cheap. In a world of PC's that don't touch the theoretical limit anyways, what do I care about burst speeds? So far so good with me!

    If I won the lottery, you better believe I'd have a smokin' awesome bada$$ mofo of a box with SCSI all over and NO IDE, .... but I don't even play the lottery...

    Fook

  • You answer your own question. I don't agree with you, but for the simple fact that Joe-Bob-Computer-User isn't going to 'see much difference' in the drives is the exact reason. Well, okay, actually isn't because they don't know the difference so they won't pay more, therefor prices aren't going down.
    Rememeber the very *very* slim profit space on HDs, and then ask a company who does SCSI how much they make off them. I'm sure it can't be too much. Think Flat-Screen TV/monitors here...

    On the other hand, I don't agree with you one bit that Joe-Bob-Computer-User won't notice a difference. Let's dream for a second here. Joe-Bob buys a nice new Compaq with a expensive SCSI setup in it. You looked at a pre-fab computer lately? They load so much crap at Windows startup it's not funny. It's pure evil, I saw a Athlon 1ghz with a GeForce run slower then my K6-2 500 with a TNT2.
    So let's say that startup crap is gone, and the OS is properly tuned. If you don't see a difference, then you have ADD.. =] The difference is very clear, try burning a CD on a nice SCSI controller with a nice drive. Then try loading some programs while doing it. Not much difference then normal use. Now try doing that on a IDE drive. Oh dear, you have whacked your IDE bus, and the overhead is causing your computer to run like a TRS-80 .. The simple point of the reduction in overhead, is more then enough for me to spend a few extra dollars (Well, maybe not a few) in getting SCSI. Now, I just need to get those few extra dollars.. =]
    Then again, this is just my observation.. =]
  • SCSI drives report the total number of blocks (READ CAPACITY command). It is the SCSI BIOS on a PC that translates that into cylinders, heads and sectors.
  • >No, but there aren't any devices out there that are going to suck up all that bandwidth on the consumer side of the market, either.

    A disk -> disk copy (for example - large zips and encryption (lots of temp space)m compiles, mp3 moves) are all quite a bit faster

    >I dare you to try and get 15 SCSI devices from different manufacturers and different scsi revisisions running reliably on the same bus.

    Well, here's what I have connected presently:
    IBM 9GB 10krpm - SCSI-3 UW (almost 2 yrs old)
    Seagate 4GB 7200rpm - SCSI-3 UW (4 yrs old)
    IBM 18GB 7200rpm - SCSI-3 UW (2 yrs old)
    Plextor PX-40TW CD - SCSI-2 UW (1 yr old)
    Plextor PX-W8220T CDR/RW - SCSI-2 UN (1 yr old)
    Nec 6x CD - SCSI-2 N - (real old)
    Iomega Jaz 1GB - SCSI-2 N (4 yrs)
    Iomega Zip 100MB - SCSI-2 N (3 yrs)
    Running on an Adaptec 2940UW (I don't remember the BIOS revision)
    (my Wang DAT drive isn't currently hooked up in that system)

    Never a SCSI problem... never... not in NT, not in Linux, not in BSD...

    >It'd be great if devices would disconnect.

    Umm.... they do.

    >Do you know how hard it is to find scsi cables and adapters in most cities - and how much you'll pay for them? UGH.

    Never had a problem... and it you want a cable that has 15 connectors and an active terminator, you are going to pay a little more for it.

    Oh, yeah - I left out external connections and chaining in my earlier list...

    I've never had any problems with my SCSI connections (Adaptec, Tekram, Future Logic controllers on a PC, IBM controllers on RS/6K, some sort of strange controller on a Sun...), except when the RAID controller on a RS/6K went belly-up after 5 years, but they installed a new one that same afternoon, and all was well.

    --
  • I didn't say windows, I said "the software", which includes the vendor's drivers.
  • I agree completely. A cheezy hack that's held on far too long.

    Unfortunately, really big scsi drives are more expensive than really big ide drives.

    If i wanted 30 gigs for mp3 storage or something similarly trivial, i'm afraid it'd be IDE in a heartbeat.

    keep in mind, my workstation at home has five (5) discrete scsi busses, and no ide drives. But I've got less than 20 gigs of scsi storage total.

    At least, with storage arrays getting bigger and bigger, the old UW stuff is hitting the market pretty cheap occasionally.

  • I've got a yamaha burner as well, and it works great, but the one thing that I noticed a few years ago -- there are IDE burners out there that work just as well for less. I think they've got an advantage in the "value" pc, which seems to be what most "consumers" are buying...

    And as far as adaptec cards? They are good, but I think they're slightly expensive... of course, the cables are what will get you, if the card doesn't. I've got a modest LAN at home, and while I've seen the virtues of SCSI, I have no need for it at home as far as a storage solution -- IDE with 2-3 users seems to work just fine.

    Also, I bought a promise ata-100 card for 40-50 bucks about 2 months ago, and using the "one drive per controller" method seems to make linux a little more responsive.

  • Look at a used computer shop or sale. I have gotten an EISA Adaptec SCSI-2 dual channel card that I haven't tested (among the computers I have I don't have an EISA MB), but it was before I bought it. Other SCSI-2 cards I got there have worked fine. They had 1Gig SCSI hds (as-is) but the 4 I got 3 worked) for $2.

    I have gotten lots of $5 or so Adaptec SCSI cards, and $20 or so NCR ones, that work with no problems. The sad thing is they are going out of business, because a few things investers wanted didn't turn out right, not that they were losing money.

  • 4. Disconnect.

    It'd be great if devices would disconnect..

    What sort of disconnect are you talking about? Are you talking about the protocol-level disconnect, which when the device does so, it lets the other devices in the system use the bus as well, or do you mean the "hot-swap" disconnect, which requires special enclosures?

    Granted, both are very nice; my all-scsi box at home outperforms (in IO) the all-IDE box at werk; similar configurations on both boxen.


    --
  • SCSI doesn't do that crap on real computers, just on PCs. When I wrote a SCSI driver for a 680X0 UNIX system, everything was done with logical blocks, not cylinders, heads and sectors. It made things so much simpler.

    SCSI has its own problems. Expensive cables, termination hassles, broken firmware, a physical interface that seems to get redesigned every year.

  • When have prices ever come down because the demand increases?

    1)Demand increases. 2)Prices and profit margins go up. 3)Everybody and his brother moves into that business. 4)Supply increases. 5)When the supply increase catches up to the demand increase, it often overshoots, leading to a glut. 6)Prices go down. Simple.
    /.

  • Well, that guy was talking BIOSs and all, so I was assuming the discussion was about PCs.

  • But at what price? (Score:5)

    by technomancerX ( 86975 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @01:40PM (#839061) Homepage

    Very nice... now how about some price comparisons:

    IBM 20GB 75 GXP $136
    IBM 60GB 75 GXP $417
    Seagate 18.4GB X15 $482

    (figures from pricewatch)

    So that's over 3x the capacity for LESS THAN the
    same price... SCSI rocks if money is no object,
    but it'll still be a while before I build a PC
    with it...

    .technomancer

  • Re:Fastest IDE hard drive, not that fast (Score:3)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @01:44PM (#839064) Journal
    I used to work at a computer store. We had 3-foot SCSI cables that cost $70. I'm sure 12 meters is nice, if you've got the $900 it would cost for such a cable. (Also, how often is a hard drive more than 18 inches from the motherboard? I've never seen one...)

    Yes, SCSI kicks the crap out of IDE, no argument there. But it is significantly more expensive. Like the other guy said, if you can afford it, great.

  • I was about to add a big cheap IDE drive to my PC, but a few smaller SCSI drives off e-bay are a much better idea!

    Heh, my antique PII 266MHz only has a 4GB UW SCSI drive right now...
  • I'll save the usual rant about why SCSI is better then IDE. I've already posted it to Slashdot like five times since I joined. It's getting old. But I will respond to a few choice comments...

    No, but there aren't any devices out there that are going to suck up all that bandwidth on the consumer side of the market, either.

    Why is it that all the IDE apologists out there say "Home users don't need that kind of bandwidth!" in response to us SCSI users, when the topic that spawned the thread is invariably a new, faster IDE spec?

    If home users don't need the speed, why do they keep making IDE faster?

    I dare you to try and get 15 SCSI devices from different manufacturers and different scsi revisisions running reliably on the same bus.

    Well, I've never gone all the way to 15 different SCSI OEMs on one bus, but I have combined several, many times, without problems. I've also seen the occasional incompatibility due to buggy firmware. But then, I've also seen the occasional incompatibility with IDE, and with only two devices. Hmmmm.

    It'd be great if devices would disconnect..

    It would be great if they powered on, too. Good thing they do!

    ... doesn't work so well when the devices start to compete and see who's smartest ...

    Um, do you have something in mind here, or are you just making it up as you go along? Seriously. The above makes almost no sense.

    Doesn't happen with IDE.

    Because it cannot. How can an inherently dumb bus have problems with intelligent devices?

    Do you know how hard it is to find scsi cables and adapters in most cities...

    Oh, for crying out loud. Why don't you just say you don't like the acronym or something? If you can't find SCSI cables, you're looking in the wrong places. I live in East Buttmunch, Cow Hamster (AKA New Hampshire, a rural state in the North-East corner of the USA), and I don't have any problems finding SCSI cables.

    ... how much you'll pay for them?

    This is mainly a matter of economy of scale. If they made as many SCSI cables as they did IDE, SCSI would be about that cheap, too.
  • The hard disk code in the PC BIOS needs to be redesigned, along with the disk partitioning scheme and data structures. The problem is that this breaks all existing operating systems on the PC.

    How do you fix the problem and maintain backwards compatibility? The BIOS could be modified to look for new signatures in the disk and operating system boot blocks. If it found the new signatures, it would use the redesigned code. If not, it would fall back to the current kludge. You would need Intel and Microsoft's support to make this work.

  • Yes! Whether we are ready for it or not, humongous storage capacities are right around the corner. Imation [imation.com] and Lucent Technologies is expected to release the first holographic discs sometime in 2002. Introductory capacities should be in excess of 125GB of removable storage! As the technology matures, holographic storage has the capacity to store nearly a terabyte per cubic cnetimeter. Becuase its holographic, access times will be more than a 1000 times faster than current hard drives.

  • Re:I need 800GB's and 16,000 RPM. (Score:3)

    by cosmosis ( 221542 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @02:34PM (#839083) Homepage
    Actually this isn't the case, as holographic means that means the data is stored everywhere but in increasingly lower resolutions as you chop it up. That means access times are almost instantaneuos. According to Imation, they have already been able to achieve throughput in excess of 60GB/sec. For obvious reasons though, they are keeping the specifics of how it works under wraps. They are confident that a commercial holographic storage product should be available by the end of 2002.
  • Why would anyone ever need...

    ...a 75GB hard drive? (2000)

    ...a 2GB hard drive? (1994)

    ...a 100MB hard drive? (1988)

    ... more than 640K of RAM? (1982?) ^_^

    More processor speed, more RAM, more disk space... someone always opens their yap about how we won't need it, and then a year later they can't imagine what they did without it, but are still bitching about how uneccesary the _next_ upgrade is. There's always a use for it! If there doesn't seem to be, it's because we didn't have the resource to play around with before.

    I swear. When cold fusion is perfected, these same peolpe will be running around going "Why would anyone need all that energy?!"

  • Okay, you had a 3' SCSI cable that costs $70. How much does a 3' UltraATA cable cost? That's right, you can't buy one at any price.

    I found a 3' Ultra2 LVD cable for sale here [ramelectronics.net] for only $45 dollars. 6' VHDCI SCSI cables are going for $93 at the same place. Still inifitely less than a 3' or 6' UltraATA cable.

    For internal use, a 22-inch Ultra2 cable costs $17, which an 18-inch UltraATA costs $2. Neither price is likely to put off most computer buyers.

    Finally, comparing current SCSI prices with current ATA prices is bogus, because the current SCSI product is many time better than the current ATA product. It's apples to oranges. If you find SCSI drives that perform on par with the fastest ATA drives, which is not easy, you will find their prices are reasonable. In fact, even crusty old SCSI drives like the Seagate Barracuda 4LP, introduced almost 5 years ago, still take the fastest ATA drives to town. Surely you could find a farm full of used Barracuda 4LPs for only a few hundred dollars, string them together into a software RAID array, and have vastly superior disk throughput than you would if you bought a shiny new IBM Deskstar GXP.

  • Re:WHY the absurd price differential? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21, 2000 @02:42PM (#839089)
    I used to write SCSI firmware and the reason SCSI drives cost more is this, they have more features and functionality, fewer SCSI drives are sold each year causing parts to cost more. Also SCSI drives usually have lower areal densities so they need more disks and heads.

    For example most SCSI hard drives support the following features:

    Command Queuing and reordering, support restricted and unrestricted reordering

    Mode pages which allow you to adjust the following:
    Read-write recovery
    Verify recovery
    Caching
    Logging
    XOR controls
    Send receive diagnostics
    Skip read/write
    And many more

    EIDE has very few parameters that you can adjust so you have less code complexity. The sad thing is most operating systems don't take advantage of some of the features of SCSI. For example tag queuing is not taken advantage of in most operating systems. Windows 95 never sends a queued command and NT never really uses much queuing (less than 4 outstanding commands at most that I have seen in a bus trace) and if you think Linux does, think again. I looked at one device driver that only supported one outstanding command per initiator and some other UN*X's are not much better. We had to develop our own tools to get 64 or more outstanding commands to a disk drive to measure re-ordering performance gains.


    I wish people would research the differences before making an opinion that has no credibility. Yes, Joe Blow user running Windows 95 won't see much of a difference running Word and Excel or playing UT, but a smart OS that understands SCSI will have significantly better IO and data integrity from disk to controller.

    Just my $0.02
  • Of course, the typical markup on computer cables is 600%, and that's just from the retailer to you. Retailers don't mark up $900 items 600% (this is why computers sell with 5% margin) because they can't get away with it.

    And haven't you ever mounted a drive (or an array) externally?

  • That's great, but when can we (Score:4)

    by bubbasatan ( 99237 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @12:38PM (#839094) Homepage
    have more than 4 IDE devices without going to absurd lengths to do it. Nowadays, most folks have at least two CD type drives (a burner, a reader, a DVD, etc.), maybe an IDE tape, at least a couple of hard drives, and not enough money to go SCSI on everything. I don't need the arguments about SCSI; I accept that it is better, faster, more scalable, etc., but I don't accept the needless price gouging. I want cheap, relatively fast, and most importantly, more than 4 IDE devices.... Surely that's not so much to ask. If IDE is that bad off, let's quit using it
  • Yes, we've gone through three powers since I've been computing. I still remember when a 75 Meg would have been huge.

    Kinda scary to consider that there are device drivers out there that take more memory than my first computer.

  • We don't need faster IDE/ATA... (Score:4)

    by Tower ( 37395 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @12:42PM (#839096)
    We need to use a better bus/protocol. SCSI has a lot of advantages over IDE, and a couple of disadvantages, but here's my quick list:
    Pros:
    1. You don't waste all of that theoretical bandwidth like you do with IDE. A more streamlined protocol.
    2. Despite the smaller protocol, it happens to be a lot more flexible - types of devices, NUMBER of devices, error recovery...
    3. Did I mention that a UW SCSI bus can have 15 targets (i.e. drives) with one initiator (i.e. controller), while IDE is still stuck at 2 per bus...
    4. Disconnect.
    5. Smarter devices - they do more for you.
    6. There is no pro #6.
    7. Generally better warantees on hard drives (ok, not a technical detail, but a selling point).
    8. Cable length.
    9. CPU utilization (much better than ATA DMA)
    10. It's fun to say.
    11. Cheaper than fiber channel.
    12. You can run it as a lan...

    Cons:
    1. More expensive controller.
    2. More expensive drive electronics.

    Still, well worth the money... plus, the better drives are always out for SCSI first, since they *are* the drives that go in even small servers (not your linux box/webserver/desktop/ftp server/Win98 box - a real server).

    --
  • Right - I have a (top-line Plextor) CD, DVD, Plextor CD-R/RW, Jaz, Zip, DAT, and several (4) hard drives all sitting on one controller. One card, one driver, fully compatible, easy to use - dare I say Plug-and-Play? Yes... it's SCSI. And it works. Fast. All The Time (TM). The devices don't step on each others feet for bus usage like in IDE, and I can get about 90% of the theoretical throughput instead of 75% with IDE...

    Please quit using IDE - clunky and slow. The prices have come down considerably for SCSI in the past couple years. It shouldn't be a problem for most people... the others can buy eMachines and iMacs [/elitist rant]

    --

  • Firewire bridge (Score:4)

    by Pope ( 17780 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @12:48PM (#839104)
    On of the big sellers over here on the Mac end of things are IDE->Firewire cases. The flexibilty of Firewire devices and the cheap price of IDE drives.
    More info is often posted over at Accelerate Your Mac [xlr8yourmac.com] web page.

    Of course this brings the ire of us folks who want native (ie bridgeless) Firewire drives, but hey, you can't expect everything at once, right.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • I just checked Ebay [ebay.com], and you can buy five (5) Seagate Barracuda 9LP drives [ebay.com] for a total of $77.50. Not only is each of these drives faster than an IBM Deskstar GXP, the five of them put together in a RAID will positively smoke the GXP.

    I realize that comparing used to new is unfair, but i'm not the one who brought up the price to performance ratio. The best bang for your buck is by far used SCSi drives.

  • 1394 not fast enough by a long strech... (Score:5)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @02:12PM (#839109) Journal
    It's definitly fast enough, 200 Mbits/sec IIRC.
    No, 1394 supports 100mbit, 200mbit, and 400mbit transfers, not just 200. However, even given 400mbit Ultra2LVD SCSI at a theoretical burst of 160MB/sec will beat the pants off of a serial 400mbit connection. Think about it, that's 40MB/sec without protocol overhead, and it's shared (though so is SCSI). Why do you think most external firewire drives on the market are just IDE disks with a IDE to 1394 interface? It's not because of price.

    I'm about ready to buy a new system and recently looked into moving from SCSI to 1394... forget it. I still want 1394 for it's multimedia potential -- yes, those SONY Digital handycams with 1394 look real promising. But fiberchannel, 1394 ain't.

    Frankly, why don't people use a two tiered approach with their systems. Folks here always degenerate the argument into an either/or debate. Either Linux or Windows, either GNOME or KDE, either IDE or SCSI; what bullshit. I use SCSI for boot and swap, and IDE for cheap storage. Do I need gigs of mp3's on a fast boot disk? No. Do I want my OS and swap on a set of chained master/slave IDE drives, with all the known contention this involves? No.

    Use both to your advantage. You'll love the system speed of SCSI for what really counts, and the savings of IDE for what's a little less important.
  • At work I'm using 30gig ide hard drives as disposable backup media for my sun farm which all uses SCSI because sun/solaris sucks beyond belief with IDE drives.

    At home I just got a WD 30gig drive and I can't play mp3's while ripping anymore. I used to have a maxtor 6 gig ide drive that didn't cause problems.

    My new system has 2 IDE busses.
    0a 30 gig drive+dvd player
    0b 10x dvd player
    1a removable (that I hot swap)
    1b not used
    This sucks because I should have the DVD drive on a different controler than the main HD but I can't hot swap on the second contoller without playing games with master/slave switches and all the removable drives are jumpperd as master (remember the disosable removable meda from above?). It looks like I need another controller.

    Do you know how many 30 gig drives you can buy for the price of a reliable scsi tape system and tapes?
  • Just curious... but if this is true:

    We had to develop our own tools to get 64 or more outstanding commands to a disk drive to measure re-ordering performance gains.

    Did "we" ever consider releasing this tool to Linux developers? Maybe they could find a way to integrate it into the kernel.

    Just a thought...

  • I built my computer about a year ago, and could find any Dual Processor ATA/66 motherboards at the time. So I went and got the Promise Ultra66 controler card, and while it gave me numerable problems with linux to start with, its now one of the best things thats happened, since I have two hard drives, a zip drive, an LS-120, and two CD-ROM drives, like you said, burner reader. All internal, all happy. It cost me about $50 a year ago, and is cheaper now, but it was well worth it as I have six internal IDE devices with room for two more. Also, on a side note, I saw a while back a motherboard which had both ATA/33 and 66 onboard, so you could actually run 8 IDE devices without using up a PCI slot like I did. I wish I could remember the board now, but can't. John

  • Fastest IDE hard drive, not that fast (Score:5)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @12:55PM (#839120)
    Compare the fastest IDE hard drive (IBM 75 GXP), with the fastest SCSI hard drive (Seagate X15), using the IOMeter benchmark's workstation access pattern:
    • Total I/O per second: X15 117% faster
    • Total throughput: X15 116% faster
    • Average I/O response: X15 53% faster
    Thanks to Storage Review [storagereview.com] for the benchmark figures.

    And remember kids, maximum length on those UltraATA cables is 18 inches(!), versus a luxurious 12 meters for Ultra160 SCSI, which transfers data much more quickly anyway.

  • N GHz CPUs
    N Gbyte/s busses
    N Gbps networks
    N ns memory

    and millisecond access on disk drives...

  • Do you know how many 30 gig drives you can buy for the price of a reliable scsi tape system and tapes?

    Around a bakers dozen, at least compared to the last time i priced DLT drives.

    Now, to head off the inevitable "What about (insert cheezy tape system here)?" - I've used OnStream, etc. They fail to meet the designations of either fast or reliable. Not that I'm a big fan of DLT either, but DLT is a lot better.

    - Eric
  • I'm a web programmer, I don't deal with hardware all that much. 90% of the time that I do, it's my home machine which I only use to play games. No need for large arrays there. I probably could use a SCSI drive, but I'd only need one, and I'm not really throughput-limited at this point. (That's right, I code for a job, not for fun. Not anymore, anyway. Like doing it 8 hours a day isn't enough. When I get home, screw programming, I play EverQuest!)

    Also, everyone kept suggesting several small SCSI drives that would be way better than one large ATA drive. Fine fine I agree, but doesn't a RAID of 9 gig drives give you a total disk space of... 9 gigs? Yes, five 5-year-old 9 gig SCSI drives will cost less than one 75 gig ATA drive. And you've got one-sixth the capacity... (And don't come back with, "No one needs 75 gigs," because that's not my point, of COURSE a top-of-the-range 75 gig drive is gonna be expensive! Duh!)

    I guess my point is, yes, SCSI is faster, and for the same amount of drive space, it's more expensive. Period. Take any SCSI drive and any ATA drive that have the same capacity, and the SCSI drive will be more expensive. (And that's because it has better performance.) That's my only point. I'm not saying more expensive is a bad thing -- if you can afford it, GREAT! I wish I had a couple hundred bucks to buy a nice 20 gig SCSI drive... and a SCSI controller... (do SCSI drives come with an interface cable? I mean, I would imagine they do...).

    Honestly, I wish all the SCSI zealots would try to understand the fact that, yes, better performance is great, and yes, SCSI rules, but when all else is equal, SCSI IS STILL MORE EXPENSIVE. This is not a difficult concept!

  • Re:Stupid question (Score:4)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @03:33PM (#839137) Homepage
    First of all disk cache isn't high speed cache like your CPU uses. Its cheap standard dram type memory.

    You don't need 2mb cache. Its pointless on modern drives. What you need is at least two full virtual "tracks" worth. Since most OS's want to format the drive so that its less than 1024 tracks that means a large ide disk will need 2*63*255*512=~16m bytes just to hold a virutal track mapping. If the drive doesn't have that, then when you do a large request, it will span real physical tracks and it will take several revolutions to get your data while you wait.

    Of course this much memory would add nearly $16 to the price of a modern drive.
  • SCSI was supposed to be a general purpose interface where you could connect Drives, printers, tape drives, scanners, mice, kb's.....just like USB is pitched now. Except that it just never worked that way. Anyone tried to connect a SCSI scanner to a loop with a bunch of drives or even mix and match devices on a single loop? Sure it MAY work but you'll probably spend some time swapping out adapters, adjusting the connection order (even though that isn't supposed to happen), terminating, not terminating blah blah blorgh.

    And oh yeah - - I've got a carton of SCSI 1,2, FW, Differential, "3" drives and adapters that don't work with one another, terminate differently have different cable connections, use 8-16bit interposers that don't work and generally require cables that cost of forking FORTUNE; The last .5 meter external U2W 68 pin cable I bought was ~$75.00 retail. Sure I could have bought it mail order for about ~$25-30 but I can't be sure they'd send me the right part.

    SCSI is great if you've got the money and time to set it up and support it but for home use? Bleh.

  • Bah! (Score:5)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Monday August 21, 2000 @03:39PM (#839141) Homepage Journal
    The old (E)IDE/ATA vs. SCSI flamewar again. I can't believe it! All I have to say is BAH

    Each have their own applications.

    As far as new equipment goes, SCSI is FAR more expensive. Yes I know you can buy old 9GB SCSI drives for peanuts and hook them up in a RAID and beat the pants off of any IDE out there. What about new systems? What if you dont have space or cooling for 8 cheap scsi drives?

    What about devices such as the TiVo that demand 30 gigs of storage in a single drive (not to mention the other electronics) to make a profit at $500? Try doing that, SCSI!

    After this, it may sound like I'm pro-IDE but really I prefer SCSI. But I'm not a bigot either and like to give IDE its fair due.

    I am quite impressed with ATA/100. I set up a RAID-0 with the HPT370+Raid ATA/100 controller which came built into my new Abit mobo and two Maxtor 20.5GB ATA/100 Drives with 4M cache each. There is one drive per chain per channel. Ive got 41GB of storage now and I'm getting burst transfers from cache of 170-180MB/s! (In other words, my max transfer is better than Ultra160 SCSI) Also, I will never need to add extra drives etc in this particular system, so SCSI doesnt have it on me there. To top it all off, all the files on this system that are getting shuffled around are in the neighborhood of 100K. It's all run through the cache. SCSI would have cost me an extra $1000 to get the same performance. That's all there is to it.

    ~GoRK

  • SCSI sucks for home use. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21, 2000 @01:07PM (#839142)

    Ok, first off - I used to be a SCSI fanatic, my first hard drive was a 80 Meg ST1096N I bought with 2 years of savings for an Amiga 500. SCSI kicks ass in the server room, but it absolutely sucks for home use. Why, you might ask?

    1. You don't waste all of that theoretical bandwidth like you do with IDE. A more streamlined protocol.

    No, but there aren't any devices out there that are going to suck up all that bandwidth on the consumer side of the market, either.

    3. Did I mention that a UW SCSI bus can have 15 targets (i.e. drives) with one initiator (i.e. controller), while IDE is still stuck at 2 per bus...

    I dare you to try and get 15 SCSI devices from different manufacturers and different scsi revisisions running reliably on the same bus. I had a couple different hard drives and CDROMs on a wonder scsi bus - it was a wonder why and when it would work.

    4. Disconnect.

    It'd be great if devices would disconnect..

    5. Smarter devices - they do more for you.

    Great idea - works well with scanners - doesn't work so well when the devices start to compete and see who's smartest, which is usually done instead of them doing what they're supposed to. Doesn't happen with IDE.

    8. Cable length.

    Do you know how hard it is to find scsi cables and adapters in most cities - and how much you'll pay for them? UGH.

    12. You can run it as a lan...

    Now this is cool; We did this with some amigas back in the day. Of course, ethernet cards work better now :).

    Overall, my experience with SCSI was hell on earth. Trying to make a scsi cdrom, burner, hard drive(s), and other goodies from different manufactuters work and boot Windows was hell on earth; I haven't had any such problems with IDE, the controllers are there, and I don't need more than 2 hard drives and 2 removable media devices in any box (I'll just buy another box and set up a server).

    YMMV though.

  • ...the problem isn't hard drive protocols. Even with SCSI you're still in the millisecond-range for disk access and latency. What we SERIOUSLY need is some hardcore development in permanent storage with micro- or nanosecond seek/latency times. Like that holographic storage we always keep hearing about... you'd think after 20 years of research, someone would have a sellable version out.

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