SCSI vs. IDE In The Real World 586
An anonymous reader writes "Gerard Beekmans has a really good comparison of the speeds of IDE and SCSI drives up over on devchannel.org. Should help put an end to the myth of IDE erasing SCSI's speed advantage." Note that Beekmans' test handicaps the SCSI disk a bit, with interesting results. (DevChannel, like Slashdot, is part of OSDN.)
IDE w/ 2meg cache? (Score:1, Interesting)
scsi and laptops (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know fo laptops that use scsi drives?
-Mary
You get what you pay for. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tape drives are like this, too. They look the same, they act about the same during the write process, but the cheapie drives that come with some servers will fail to reread the tapes if they're reused as constantly as they are in most businesses (who, on average, reuse the same weekly tapes for a full year or more!). Better to put the money into a DLTtape solution than to rely on what's bundled with the server.
Not an accurate test (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is absolutely true. Apple used to ship all SCSI drives in their machines and I still have twelve year old Macs that have never had a hard drive failure. The new IDE drives however are a different story. That said, Apple appears to do more quality testing on their hard drives in that since Apple started shipping Macs with IDE drives, I have had two failures. Compare this with Wintel boxes like Dells where I have had close to ten IDE drive failures.
The other issue that folks should know is that if you are doing any work that is truly disc intensive (like photoshop or scientific computing) then SCSI has historically been the protocol of choice with much faster speeds possible with SCSI. For instance, I have insisted on 10-15k RPM drives for my work and they are much faster than even the fastest IDE devices. This is starting to change with fast SATA drives however and I am looking forward to some new options with the G5.
Re:SCSI vs. IDE: Same experiences (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason for this being that SCSI handles far more of the overhead of managing the disk on the controller than IDE, which left much of the work to the CPU. Of course, this technological gap has narrowed considerably with the evolution of IDE into EIDE and now ATA drives.
I have to confess, I'm a die hard SCSI fan when I can justify it (although I might be swayed by second generation SATA). While the real world performance gap of SCSI-vs-IDE is long gone, SCSI drives are still synonomous with servers, which usually translates into a more robust product. How much is *your* data worth compared to the SCSI price premium?
Holy war? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cache size (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Meaningless.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ATTN: Slashdot community (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget your delusions about this being a site for a "community". It's a business.
SCSI over NFS better than Local ATA for me! (Score:5, Interesting)
That says something.
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason for this has to do with "Just In Time Manufacturing" (no inventory) & low margins. Its not permissible to have inventory because of JITM. Its not feasible to have multiple assembly lines for the same process (excepting if you need the production capacity because of order volume) because of low margins. And, its not reasonable to keep 'resetting' your main production line for a different customer's procedures (imagine you're in the middle of a several day process of changing over when you get a call from your biggest customer saying he needs 16 hrs of parts TOMORROW... it happens all the time...keep those lines ready).
Its just far simpler to find a common QA level that everyone can agree to. If you have a customer that demands a certain high level of quality on a product line.. then that's what you produce (if his volume is high enough to warrant) for all. You can certainly have varied product lines (which probably span multiple assembly lines). Those varied product lines almost certainly do have varying degrees of QA/testing.
What I'm asserting is that you don't make 2 products that are exactly alike in every respect except the level of quality that you use for your customers (for big markets like HDDs... if you work out of your garage.. its no biggie). If you have an 'assembly line' that is 'better'.. then you make a new 'product line' and charge more than you charge for the other one. (I'm also saying that Dell/Apple use the same line of HDD's...now that Apple has dropped SCSI as standard.)
Re:IDE w/ 2meg cache? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pieroxy wrote: Dude: 7 minutes vs 28 seconds. That's more than 1:14!!!
Dude: This comparison leaves so much out that it is completely meaningless.
I have actually been part of benchmarks that had such a wide disparity in performance. But we could back up our results with rigorous benchmark standards and results. The benchmarks involved several different database engines on the exact same server hardware, storage subsystem and operating system. All system parameters, data load processes, operating system optimizations, DBMS tuning and queries were carefully documented and reviewed by independent SME's. Benchmark results were documented and reviewed after being repeated multiple times for each system. At the end of it all we had a benchmark that was acceptable to our customers, the engineers and the PHB's.
This so called benchmark would be laughed out the door. SCSI generally performs better for I/O intensive scenarios and that can be proven with appropriate benchmarking. But this "benchmark" was not rigorous or thorough and proved nothing.
reason it's biased (Score:2, Interesting)
so, he has to make it out as good to prove to himself what he just bought will beat ide.
also, not to mention he never stated brand names.
certain manufacturers are very different.