Adrian,
SCSI in itself is not really faster than the latest UDMA ide interfaces.
There is another layer of arbitration that has to be gone through to read
from a device as the SCSI bus is an idependant bus. I have seen tests some
where they took identical drives (except interface) and tested them side by
side and the ide drive won because the command has to go through less steps
with UDMA than SCSI. So if you get an old SCSI drive don't expect it to be
faster than your new 7200 rpm IDE scorcher.
Now that i've sort of bashed SCSI I'll give you the advantages.
1. The fastest drives made are SCSI. New harddrive technology debuts in
high end SCSI drives. The 15000 rpm Seagate cheatah is one ex. of this. Of
course they are some of the most expensive.
2. Much more expandable. You can up to 7 narrow and /or15 wide devices to a
single SCSI adaptor card which uses only one irq. This is opposed to 2
devices per channel on IDE at one irq per channel.
3. More variety of devices. DVD, -RAM's,-RW's, tape drives, CD-ROM, RW's,
R's, hard drives, solid state storage, scanners, high end printers, and much
more.
4. Separate bus. This may be a disadvantage with one device but when it
comes to doing high intensity disk activities the scsi buss really shines.
It uses a lot less cpu cycles to do inter-bus tranfers (from scsi hdd to
cdrw for ex.) That's why scsi cd burners have lower processor utilization
than ide ones do. Before burn proof you had a lot less coasters with scsi
cdrw's and you do other things while the cdburner was doing it's thing.
Caching raid controllers are still almost unheard of in the ide world. In a
server enviroment scsi is usually the best way to go.
So scsi has a quite a few advantages in the right enviroments. In a typical
desktop enviroment it's probably not worth the extra cost. But if you
consider yourself a power user and need the expandability and have the cash
then go for it.
Don S
----- Original Message -----
From: "Adrian Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 6:57 PM
Subject: [newbie] OT 6th question - SCSI vs IDE OT
> this came up the other day.
> someone told me that a SCSI hard drive is faster than an IDE hard drive.
> i have never used a SCSI drive in my life, so i don't know from
experience.
> is this true??
>
> thanks much
> no more questions for now
>
>
>
> Adrian Smith
> 'de telepone dude
> Telecom Dept.
> x 7042
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
