[milhous]

hands down, plain and simple. why go for one of those "special edition" drives when you can put in a fat 10-15K scsi drive running in 160mb/s or 320mb/s raided mode. watch it blow those fat photoshop files away and watch boot times get decimated.

and since you can't beat 'em, join 'em. be a scsi switcher!

[Cipher13]

Cheers to that - money aside, nothing at all compares to SCSI. There is no substitute

[The Dude]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
Cheers to that - money aside, nothing at all compares to SCSI. There is no substitute

I hate to rain on this parade here, but price is one big factor in buying hardware. If the price is outlandish with storage being lower than that of an IDE drive, I know where I'm going.

Maybe when currency becomes obliterated (never), we can all bask in the joy that is SCSI.

[olePigeon]

http://www.iscsi.com/

And you think 320MB/sec is fast? How about 3.2GB/sec AND it's networkable! Yep, mounting volumes and booting yer computer over a network at 3.2GB/sec. Weeee! iSCSI is gonna own.

By the way, IDE and SCSI were both developed by the same consortium. IDE is a cheap, lowcost solution. That's why they're flimsy, slow, and break easily. You can buy another one in a snap. SCSI is more of a highspeed permanent investment.

Originally posted by The Dude:


I hate to rain on this parade here, but price is one big factor in buying hardware. If the price is outlandish with storage being lower than that of an IDE drive, I know where I'm going.

Maybe when currency becomes obliterated (never), we can all bask in the joy that is SCSI.

[The Godfather]

Isn't a RAM disk faster and cheaper?

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by The Godfather:
Isn't a RAM disk faster and cheaper?

yes, and they're also a great way to back up your data.

-r.

[Cipher13]

RAM disk via what? I'm not talking so much about the drives, but the medium... a SCSI RAM disk, for eg, would be very speedy

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
RAM disk via what? I'm not talking so much about the drives, but the medium... a SCSI RAM disk, for eg, would be very speedy

huh? what are you talking about?

-r.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
RAM disk via what? I'm not talking so much about the drives, but the medium... a SCSI RAM disk, for eg, would be very speedy

I thought a RAM disk was alocating space from your RAM and treating it like a mounted volume?

Unless you're talking about those semi-new flash drives that are like giant memory, then yeah, that would be REALLY fast via dual channel U160 SCSI.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

If you're running a *heavily accessed* server, or editing true film-resolution content (and no, that's not yer little DV cam footage) or running a render farm, or running a heavily used LAN storage system, or other type of (usually networked) system that needs *sustained* high-capacity data transfer firepower- then yeah, you NEED to have $C$I.

Otherwise, standard desktop systems as used by Joe and Jane Blow average consumer barely make full use even of the current ATA standard, let alone need to have $C$I- other than for mostly useless bragging rights. On a system without the high stress demands and constant use for tasks like those above, the price/storage ratio of $C$I devices is downright wasteful.

Might be good to use a single $C$I drive for added boot and OS level speed (so long as one already had the hardware) other than that- big waste of $ for most people.

But hey, serial ATA all the way!

[olePigeon]

A nice speedy SCSI drive for your boot volume, then a 360GB ATA for your apps, porn, and MP3s.

Originally posted by CRASH HARDDRIVE:
If you're running a *heavily accessed* server, or editing true film-resolution content (and no, that's not yer little DV cam footage) or running a render farm, or running a heavily used LAN storage system, or other type of (usually networked) system that needs *sustained* high-capacity data transfer firepower- then yeah, you NEED to have $C$I.

Otherwise, standard desktop systems as used by Joe and Jane Blow average consumer barely make full use even of the current ATA standard, let alone need to have $C$I- other than for mostly useless bragging rights. On a system without the high stress demands and constant use for tasks like those above, the price/storage ratio of $C$I devices is downright wasteful.

Might be good to use a single $C$I drive for added boot and OS level speed (so long as one already had the hardware) other than that- big waste of $ for most people.

But hey, serial ATA all the way!

[l008com]

Originally posted by CRASH HARDDRIVE:
If you're running a *heavily accessed* server, or editing true film-resolution content (and no, that's not yer little DV cam footage) or running a render farm, or running a heavily used LAN storage system, or other type of (usually networked) system that needs *sustained* high-capacity data transfer firepower- then yeah, you NEED to have $C$I.

Otherwise, standard desktop systems as used by Joe and Jane Blow average consumer barely make full use even of the current ATA standard, let alone need to have $C$I- other than for mostly useless bragging rights. On a system without the high stress demands and constant use for tasks like those above, the price/storage ratio of $C$I devices is downright wasteful.

Might be good to use a single $C$I drive for added boot and OS level speed (so long as one already had the hardware) other than that- big waste of $ for most people.

But hey, serial ATA all the way!

Your forgetting about the rest of us. Who are probably most of the people that hand around in Mac forums. We do not have high end servers/film editing systems etc etc, but at the same time, we certainly aren't "joe blow check my email, go to a web site, type up a doc in AppleWorks, go to bed" either. OS X on its own uses the disk much more heavily than OS 9. Then when you count in how much easier it is for both the computer and the user to run and use more programs at once, disc use can really skyrocket. For use every day folk, SCSI drives, like a cheap 3 drive Stipe, would be a GREAT performance boost to our systems.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Originally posted by l008com:
For use every day folk, SCSI drives, like a cheap 3 drive Stipe, would be a GREAT performance boost to our systems.

That's why I said 'for most people' and Joe and Jane consumer.

Hey if it's cost/performance effective for you to set up a 3 $C$I raid by all means do so.

For most people, fast 7200RPM ATA drives are plenty fast enough, as they are rarely called on to perform heavy sustained and networked performance of the type I listed, in most consumer and even many prosumer level systems.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by olePigeon:


I thought a RAM disk was alocating space from your RAM and treating it like a mounted volume?

Unless you're talking about those semi-new flash drives that are like giant memory, then yeah, that would be REALLY fast via dual channel U160 SCSI.

Oh, you mean conventional RAM disks - I was thinking external large solid state memory drives

[nana4]

Originally posted by olePigeon:
http://www.iscsi.com/

And you think 320MB/sec is fast? How about 3.2GB/sec AND it's networkable! Yep, mounting volumes and booting yer computer over a network at 3.2GB/sec. Weeee! iSCSI is gonna own.

iSCSI is simply the SCSI command set encapsulated into TCP/IP packets, currently it runs at Gigabit Ethernet speeds, and will work with 10 Gigabit Ethernet products when they hit the market this/next year.

The major benefit of SCSI is the low access times, whether the interface runs at 160 or 320MB/sec is not relevant if the drive maxes out at 75MB/sec. Or course for multiple drives, then U320 can come in handy.

[starman]

I just started looking into replacing these EXPENSIVE $C$I drives with IDE simply because the size vs. cost issue is starting to creep up. I'm running out of room, and $145for a 50GB UW160 $C$I drive just doesn't cut it. For less than that you can get a 7200 RPM ATA 100 160GB drive. Am I seriously supposed to support SCSI for better speed with THAT much of a storage and cost difference?

No.

So I decided to run benchmarks. I used Sandra on a P4 1.3 GHz.

UW160 7200 RPM 9 GB SCSI Drive - 7313kB/sec
ATA100 60 GB 7200 RPM Drive - 21794 kB/sec

WHOA!

Ok, so I read that the Sandra scores weren't reliable because of the fact that it's using the ATA drive's cache instead of reading from the drive itself. So I used Winbench 99

UW160 7200 RPM 9 GB SCSI Drive - 2412kB/sec
ATA100 60 GB 7200 RPM Drive - 5716 kB/sec

No contest.

Two comparisons. Both results show that the ATA drive beats the crap out of the SCSI drive.

Less cost. More storage. IDE owns.

Mike

[milhous]

starman:

that can't be right. are you running that hard disk off a legacy host controller?

[starman]

Originally posted by milhous:
starman:

that can't be right. are you running that hard disk off a legacy host controller?

IIRC, it's an Adaptec 29160 controller. Intel P4 mobo (don't know the model #).

Mike

[nana4]

Originally posted by starman:
No contest.

Two comparisons. Both results show that the ATA drive beats the crap out of the SCSI drive.

Less cost. More storage. IDE owns.

Mike

I'm not surprised that a modern IDE drive beats a slothy 7200rpm several year old SCSI drive. If you are going to go SCSI, then spend the money on a modern 10K or 15K drive. The lastest Seagate 15k.3 gives STR of over 75MB/sec at the start of the disk. Even the 2nd gen X15-36LP gives reasonable results, here's two of them in software RAID 0:




Sandra results for those who care what this crap benchmark gives:




And here's the lowly first gen 15K drive. Notice the access times which are half that of any IDE drive.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by nana4:
iSCSI is simply the SCSI command set encapsulated into TCP/IP packets, currently it runs at Gigabit Ethernet speeds, and will work with 10 Gigabit Ethernet products when they hit the market this/next year.

The major benefit of SCSI is the low access times, whether the interface runs at 160 or 320MB/sec is not relevant if the drive maxes out at 75MB/sec. Or course for multiple drives, then U320 can come in handy.

Absolutely. Actually, the drives themselves don't push more than 22.8 MB/sec. But that comes out to almost exactly 160MB/sec with a 7 drive RAID. Now if you have a dual channel U160 (U320) you can have a 14 drive RAID system chugging out full througput.

And you're right about the iSCSI, however, there's a little more to it. It's also a faster SCSI interface via the physical connection with theoretical speeds of up to 3.2GB/sec. Of course, over a standard 10-Base10 you won't get more than 1.25GB/sec (at least when 10-Base10 becomes a standard.) It's intended to replace Fibre Channel as a cheaper and faster solution.

Originally posted by starman:
Two comparisons. Both results show that the ATA drive beats the crap out of the SCSI drive.
Less cost. More storage. IDE owns.
Mike

There's something seriously wrong with your SCSI drive. By definition, 160MB/sec is faster than 12.5MB/sec. So there's no bottleneck in your controller (unless there's problems with the dirvers someplace.)

So there's 5 possible reasons why it's so freakin' slow:

1) Your drive isn't spinning to full RPMs.
2) Your drivers are conflicting.
3) Your SCSI card is accessed via your ISA port which is limited to 8MB/sec.
4) Your SCSI HDD is only SCSI-II, meaning it will get a maximum of 5MB/sec.
5) You're connecting a narrow SCSI onto a wide SCSI controller and you don't have parity jumpered.

In any event, this means your SCSI connection is fux0rd.

[nana4]

Where do you get the figure of 22.8MB/sec max per drive from?

Also FC-AL runs at a maximum of 1.6 Gbit/sec on dual loops, or 200MB/sec. Single loop = 100MB/sec. I believe there is room in the spec for 3.2Gbps or 400MB/sec at a later time. The main benefit of FC is the large cable runs possible.

I think starman just has a really slow old 7200rpm SCSI drive, nothing wrong with his setup probably.

[Spliffdaddy]

try this...

Using a dual channel SCSI adapter, place one hard drive on each channel, and RAID them into a striped pair (0).

Check the read/write speeds.

Add a third hard drive and stripe all three into one RAID 0 drive.

check the read/write speeds.

unchanged, huh?

Each SCSI controller can only 'talk' to one drive at a time.

there is no increase in read/write speed when you add more than one drive per controller.

I striped six Seagate Barracudas into one big drive - but it wasn't any faster than having 2.

Check your math, Pigeon

[l008com]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
try this...

Using a dual channel SCSI adapter, place one hard drive on each channel, and RAID them into a striped pair (0).

Check the read/write speeds.

Add a third hard drive and stripe all three into one RAID 0 drive.

check the read/write speeds.

unchanged, huh?

Each SCSI controller can only 'talk' to one drive at a time.

there is no increase in read/write speed when you add more than one drive per controller.

I striped six Seagate Barracudas into one big drive - but it wasn't any faster than having 2.

Check your math, Pigeon

You are exactly wrong. IDE can only talk to one drive at a time, one of the reasons SCSI is great is because it can talk to them ALL at once. There wouldn't be a RAID 0 if it couldn't.

[nana4]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
try this...

Using a dual channel SCSI adapter, place one hard drive on each channel, and RAID them into a striped pair (0).

Check the read/write speeds.

Add a third hard drive and stripe all three into one RAID 0 drive.

check the read/write speeds.

unchanged, huh?

Each SCSI controller can only 'talk' to one drive at a time.

there is no increase in read/write speed when you add more than one drive per controller.

I striped six Seagate Barracudas into one big drive - but it wasn't any faster than having 2.

Check your math, Pigeon

My RAID 0 is 2 drives on a single U160 channel. A controller may only talk to one drive at a time, but once a command has been given, it can disconnect from that drive and move to the next, leaving the drive to do work by itself until it needs the bus again.

[nana4]

Originally posted by l008com:


You are exactly wrong. IDE can only talk to one drive at a time, one of the reasons SCSI is great is because it can talk to them ALL at once. There wouldn't be a RAID 0 if it couldn't.

Nope. Both IDE and SCSI can only talk to one drive at a time. The advantage of SCSI being it can then let the drive do work by itself via disconnect. IDE RAID with drives on both Master and Slave shows the performance penalty in this.

[Spliffdaddy]

< hardly ever wrong about computer hardware

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by nana4:
Where do you get the figure of 22.8MB/sec max per drive from?

I misquoted. That's for a 68-pin wide SCSI interface at 7200 RPMs. Absolutely nothing near the current speeds and standards. IBM has a similar drive to the one I was quoting from (I can't find the PDF for it) which sustains at 29MB/sec.

However, Ultra320 drives with an 80-pin SCA interface can sustain up to 75MB/sec (maximum of 89MB/sec.) So as you can see, my SCSI drives are thoroughly outdated.

Technology moves fast.

For U320:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...t373453lc.html

For the slower drive:
http://www-3.ibm.com/storage/hdd/tec...56A7A006C9659/$file/U73LZX_ds.pdf

[Spliffdaddy]

ATA drives utilizing DMA (direct memory access) (i.e. ALL IDE drives sold in the last few years) do not use many CPU cycles to move the data. Only ancient PIO - mode drives are CPU-intensive.

SCSI offers few advantages over ATA. Only two come to mind. 1) support for more than 2 devices per channel & 2) they can be hot-pluggable

Other than that, pfft. nothing.

SCSI had its heyday back in the mid-90s. Let it die with dignity.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by nana4:
Nope. Both IDE and SCSI can only talk to one drive at a time. The advantage of SCSI being it can then let the drive do work by itself via disconnect. IDE RAID with drives on both Master and Slave shows the performance penalty in this.

Exactly. SCSI only requires roughly 4% of the CPU, the rest is offloaded on the onboard controller. IDE, on the other hand, can demand as much as 95% of the attention of your CPU.

Here's a test for you Starman:

Encode a decent sized DiVX movie -- or anything CPU intensive, really -- while you transfer your file. Then report back on the performance of both drives.

As an example, this is why most heavy realtime video editing and audio composition is done over SCSI.

[Spliffdaddy]

IDE does not equal DMA

IDE can be PIO mode.

There is no way a modern DMA drive will use more than a few % of CPU cycles.

What you said was true back in 1996, however.

[nana4]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
ATA drives utilizing DMA (direct memory access) (i.e. ALL IDE drives sold in the last few years) do not use many CPU cycles to move the data. Only ancient PIO - mode drives are CPU-intensive.

SCSI offers few advantages over ATA. Only two come to mind. 1) support for more than 2 devices per channel & 2) they can be hot-pluggable

Other than that, pfft. nothing.

SCSI had its heyday back in the mid-90s. Let it die with dignity.

A couple more advantages come to mind. Cable lengths of upto 12m (25m with a single device). And perhaps most importantly, a solid 5 year warranty when almost all IDE manufacturers are scurrying away from 3 years and replacing them with magnificent, confidence building 1 year warranties

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by nana4:
A couple more advantages come to mind. Cable lengths of upto 12m (25m with a single device). And perhaps most importantly, a solid 5 year warranty when almost all IDE manufacturers are scurrying away from 3 years and replacing them with magnificent, confidence building 1 year warranties

Well that, and the fact that he completely avoided the whole reason this thread started in the first place: 320MB/sec versus 17MB/sec.

Plus, IDE is more reliant on burst speeds and has relatively low sustainable data throughput compared to SCSI.

Let's not forget the FireWire is an extension of SCSI.

[nana4]

What is running at 17MB/sec?

[starman]

Originally posted by olePigeon:


There's something seriously wrong with your SCSI drive. By definition, 160MB/sec is faster than 12.5MB/sec. So there's no bottleneck in your controller (unless there's problems with the dirvers someplace.)

So there's 5 possible reasons why it's so freakin' slow:

1) Your drive isn't spinning to full RPMs.
2) Your drivers are conflicting.
3) Your SCSI card is accessed via your ISA port which is limited to 8MB/sec.
4) Your SCSI HDD is only SCSI-II, meaning it will get a maximum of 5MB/sec.
5) You're connecting a narrow SCSI onto a wide SCSI controller and you don't have parity jumpered.

In any event, this means your SCSI connection is fux0rd.

I don't have conflicting drivers.

If the drive isn't spinning as fast as it should, how can I control that?

ISA? Uh, no. PCI.

The drive is an IBM DNES-309170W Ultra-Wide

I'll have to check the BIOS of the Adaptec card, but there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the OS (WinXP).

Mike

[nana4]

winXP has a problem with SCSI performance. win2k is preferable until the issue is fixed.

[starman]

Originally posted by nana4:
winXP has a problem with SCSI performance. win2k is preferable until the issue is fixed.

Uh, I'm not going to change a whole OS just for poor disk performance. XP is better for our environment by a longshot.

FYI: I checked the XP SP1 notes and in fact, they have a fix for this very problem.

However, because of the LIMITED disk space I have on my SCSI drive, I can't install SP1 until I move stuff off it.

Mike

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by starman:


Uh, I'm not going to change a whole OS just for poor disk performance. XP is better for our environment by a longshot.

FYI: I checked the XP SP1 notes and in fact, they have a fix for this very problem.

However, because of the LIMITED disk space I have on my SCSI drive, I can't install SP1 until I move stuff off it.

Mike

Too bad SP1 doesn't fix the Win32 API exploit. Hah! *snort*

As for your SCSI, try downloading the latest firmware update. I noticed that on the Mac U160 card they didn't fix slowed performance issues until late last year. I don't know how recent your firmware is.

[nana4]

XP SP1 does not fix the problem. Timed copies between drives take far longer under winXP SP1 than win2K. SP1 implements a previous hotfix that solves a similar, but not identical problem. MS is still working on the fix for the low write speeds. Read speeds are not affected. There is a workaround by using dynamic disks but really this should not be required if the OS was working properly.

http://forums.storagereview.net/view...1758&start=600

[starman]

Here are my results from Winbench 99:

SCSI card - Adaptec 29160 firmware 2.57.2
OS - Windows XP
Mobo - Intel 1.3 GHz D850GB

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Version 2000 Build 21
CPU Name Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1300MHz
CPU Family 15
CPU Model 0
CPU Stepping 7
CPU Features 0x3FEBFBFF
CPU Clock Speed 1300
CPU L1 Cache (KB) 20
CPU L2 Cache (KB) 256
System BIOS Version D850GB - 20001117
System RAM (MB) 640
Display Adapter Name (Make/Model) ATI Technologies Inc. RAGE 128 PRO AGP 4X TMDS

C Drive - IBM DNES-309170W - 9 GB 7200RPM
WEIGHTED SUITE SCORE UNITS NOTES

Business Disk WinMark 99 2660 Thousand Bytes/Sec 2,3
High-End Disk WinMark 99 5330 Thousand Bytes/Sec 2,3

TEST SCORE UNITS NOTES

Disk Playback/Bus:Overall 2660 Thousand Bytes/Sec 1,2,3
Disk Playback/HE:Overall 5330 Thousand Bytes/Sec 1,2,3
Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 6520 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 15200 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE 8290 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HEhotoshop 4.0 2040 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HEremiere 4.2 4670 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 7930 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 6980 Thousand Bytes/Sec

D Drive - ATA 100 WDC300 30 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM
WEIGHTED SUITE SCORE UNITS NOTES

Business Disk WinMark 99 4670 Thousand Bytes/Sec 2,3
High-End Disk WinMark 99 12300 Thousand Bytes/Sec 2,3

TEST SCORE UNITS NOTES

Disk Playback/Bus:Overall 4670 Thousand Bytes/Sec 1,2,3
Disk Playback/HE:Overall 12300 Thousand Bytes/Sec 1,2,3
Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 15900 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 13900 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE 12800 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HEhotoshop 4.0 9800 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HEremiere 4.2 12700 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 29800 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 7080 Thousand Bytes/Sec

[milhous]

::thread bump::^

[starman]

I got a 10k RPM drive but haven't benchmarked it yet. Noticably faster, but no numbers yet. I'll post numbers as soon as I get a chance to close my apps and run the test.

Mike

[tooki]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
ATA drives utilizing DMA (direct memory access) (i.e. ALL IDE drives sold in the last few years) do not use many CPU cycles to move the data. Only ancient PIO - mode drives are CPU-intensive.

SCSI offers few advantages over ATA. Only two come to mind. 1) support for more than 2 devices per channel & 2) they can be hot-pluggable

Other than that, pfft. nothing.

SCSI had its heyday back in the mid-90s. Let it die with dignity.

IDE most certainly can be hot-pluggable. Apple does it in the Xserve, and in several PowerBook models (all the G3 models, maybe more). CardBus (and its predecessors, PC Card and PCMCIA) are based on IDE, and are also hot pluggable.

Serial ATA is also hot-pluggable.

SCSI's biggest advantage, IMHO, is that the OS can send several read/write requests to a drive, and then the drive can reorganize those requests to reach optimal efficiency (so that it will fill all the requests in the order the disk spins them by the heads). IDE drives can't do this, so they always finish one request before even receiving the next. Basically, think of it as an elevator: 4 people get in on floor 20, and people press for floors 5, 17, 9, and 1. SCSI will stop at 17, then 9, then 5, then 1, while IDE will go to five first (and skip 17 and 9!), then travel back to 17, then back down to 9, and finally down to 1. Obviously, SCSI will get everyone where they need to be a lot faster.



But I, too, agree that SCSI is just too expensive for what it provides. Also, think about the fact that if SCSI drives were manufactured in the same volume as IDE drives, they'd be a LOT cheaper.

tooki

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by tooki:
But I, too, agree that SCSI is just too expensive for what it provides. Also, think about the fact that if SCSI drives were manufactured in the same volume as IDE drives, they'd be a LOT cheaper.

It simply depends on what market your'e in. For the casual user, archiving, and storage IDE is perfect. But for highend digital audio and video, highspeed and highthroughput data services, and networked corporate storage you almost HAVE to go with SCSI.

[l008com]

I'm just glad I can click unsubscribe when I get sick of a thread with this forum.

[OreoCookie]

There are various incorrect statements. Hot plugging is possible with IDE, just take a look at the XServe and the XRaid.

There are only two advantages left for SCSI. 1. reliability. There's more than one reason these drives are more expensive. 2. seek time. If you compare a 15k SCSI model to a 7,200 rpm IDE (or SCSI) drive, the seek time is less than half (it's less than half for the Cheetah 15k, because the platters are smaller than usual for better seek times).

Other than that, there is little advantage that would justify the extra expense per GByte. Come on, you can edit multiple streams of video + audio simultaneously with modern IDE drives. What do you need more? You could brag that your computer has faster start-up times. But the investment in larger drives would be a wiser choice, especially if you are editing video.

Almost none of us here needs SCSI anymore.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by tooki:
SCSI's biggest advantage, IMHO, is that the OS can send several read/write requests to a drive, and then the drive can reorganize those requests to reach optimal efficiency (so that it will fill all the requests in the order the disk spins them by the heads). IDE drives can't do this, so they always finish one request before even receiving the next. Basically, think of it as an elevator: 4 people get in on floor 20, and people press for floors 5, 17, 9, and 1. SCSI will stop at 17, then 9, then 5, then 1, while IDE will go to five first (and skip 17 and 9!), then travel back to 17, then back down to 9, and finally down to 1. Obviously, SCSI will get everyone where they need to be a lot faster.

IDE drives (at least some manufactured by IBM) are able to do that, too. Wouldn't know if I didn't read it recently.