On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:58:59PM -0800, Noah Meyerhans wrote: > On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 12:21:33PM -0700, Jason Majors wrote: > > Also, I'd recommend a 40GB or so IBM ATAPI hard drive instead of the > SCSI > > option. It'll cost you less and provide about the same access speed. > Maybe > > even faster access, if you get a 60 or 80 GB drive. Just make sure > it's a > > 7200RPM drive. > No way! Those drives are very much worth the money. How can you > compare a 7200 RPM IDE disk to a 10k RPM SCSI disk? IDE is cheap for a > reason. It's junk. Don't put junk in such a nice machine!
There are several reasons that IDE is cheaper that SCSI: (1) Buffer sizes--I haven't seen any IDE drives have 2 MB or less, while comparable SCSI drives have 4 MB (2) Seek times--usually twice as high on IDE. (3) Rotational speed--usually higer on the more expensive drives. (4) Warranty period--IDE drives usually have a 1 year warranty, while SCSI tends to be 3 years. Now, look at the cost deltas. For what it costs to get a SCSI drive, I can usually get 2 larger IDE drives. With software mirroring, I can get at least as good a read performance, with write performance suffering only a little (if at all). And I've got a mirror for when I loose one. It's not about which technology is better--SCSI is clearly a better technology (we'll see what serial ATA brings), it's about which is more cost effective. I have several systems in my colo which have 300-500 GiB of storage in them, some of which (the 300 GiB systems) would have been inordinately expensive to do with SCSI (4 73 GiB scsi drives==Lotsabucks), and the larger (490GiB) systems would have been all but impossible--these are 5 drive 2u rack systems. I wish SCSI were 1/2 the price, then it would be easier to justify, but with the current price points, it's often cheaper to build 2 complete systems off of IDE than 2 out of SCSI. -- Share and Enjoy.