Western Digital Pulling Out Of SCSI HD Business 454
leiz writes "This article on Yahoo says Western Digital is pulling out of the enterprise hard drive business. This means they will no longer produce SCSI hard drives and Western Digital will be instead concentrating on the IDE and software business. What does this mean for the SCSI market? With 7200 rpm UltraATA/66 hard drives catching up in performance to SCSI HD, products such as the Fastrak RAID 0, 1, 0+1 card, and the cheap cost affectiveness of IDE/ATA, is SCSI no longer necessary for desktops / workstations / small servers?"
What software do they make? (Score:1)
I didn't realize they had any software.
Good riddance (Score:1)
Hmm (Score:1)
Re: WD leaving
SCSI is that much better (Score:1)
For a server or high-performance workstation where you need to get every ounce of performance out of it, go SCSI. Anything else, go IDE.
SCSI Still Better (Score:2)
putting scanners on a parallel port? bah!
putting CDRs on parallel? bah!
i like having one damn bus for everything. a nice clean interface. no stupid driver problems.
scsi makes sense.
and i'm pronouncing that "sexy."
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Re:Good riddance (Score:1)
IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:4)
When I use SCSI (Score:1)
-LW
Performance issues (Score:1)
Now, if only they didn't cost nearly double!
Re:MALDA: Give meaning to your words! (Score:4)
I pity the fool who don't like mr T!
Mr T vs Slashdot [tripod.com]
Go Read it suckas!
Rant (Score:3)
Re:No SCSI? (Score:2)
And FYI, UDMA/66 doesn't mean those drives are 66mb per second. It means that you can share 66mb/sec throughput with two UDMA/66 drives. That's 33mb each. You still have to deal with IDE's command queue and latency problems. You just have a wider channel. UDMA/66 was created because IDE drives are getting close to maxing out the UDMA/33 interface, speed wise. Two 7200rpm IDE drives could theoretically hit a bottleneck when used simultaneously with only 33mb of channel throughput.
Ultra/160 SCSI will fix all you IDE kiddies.
Not a real surprise... (Score:2)
Mark Duell
How much room do you need? (Score:2)
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
1) Anything better than ultrawide SCSI is pointless for average users. Yes, you can crank out more performance with seven striped drives, but who really has the money.
2) Decent ultrawide controllers are relatively cheap (look at NCR/Symbios based cards.)
3) Smaller SCSI disks are getting very affordable, where small 10GB and cheap $200.
4) SCSI has lower CPU overhead and doesn't make your system slug along as the kernel babysits the disk transfers.
5) SCSI disks are usually made with higher MTBFs in mind.
6) Where do you need the performance? Swap, binaries, config files, libraries. Mostly swap.
7) Do you really need massive performance on the disks that hold your MP3 collection? Didn't think so.
8) IDE disks are shit cheap.
The moral? SCSI is slick. Don't spend too much on a controller or disks. Put your root on that disk. Then use IDE for all non-critical data.
No kidding (Score:2)
Just another typical day at WDC (Score:4)
Re:'bout fucking time (Score:2)
However, attempt running a server of any kind with roughly 200 users pulling about 5 apps a piece using IDE/UDMA drives. What you will get is really bad load times. SCSI has the ability to read/write at the same time, not to mention it can read/write to all the drives on the chain at the same time Vs IDE's ability to read or write on one drive per BUS. Hence why you get better performance from having Ur HD and CD-Rom on sperate IDE buses.
However, I think that WD is possibly pulling out of the SCSI HD market for reason like, high pricing causeing low volume sales, the explosion of home networking, or they are just tired of making SCSI drives for other venders. It's not often you find a WD labeled HD. But the recent explosion in home networks is what I'd bet some of my money on. Now with the average of 2/3 pc's per house, that 2/3 times the ammount of HD's being used and as we all know, most home systems containe IDE HD's.
Each of the two formats IDE - SCSi has it's advantages and dis-advantages. It just all depends on what you want to use it for, and how much you have in you wallet. Still though, it's sad to see a company give up on a product after so long.
ATA will not supplant SCSI. (Score:3)
1. ATA-66 can't touch 160 mb SCSI, even single drive to single drive, with serial access.
2. ATA performs very poorly when multiple reads and writes queue up.
3. SCSI handles large numbers (>4) drives much better, ATA sees problems with just 2 drives per channel.
Maybe ATA-262 will have a shot.
-Peter
Re:Hmm (Score:3)
Well, I'm a SCSI-only kinda guy myself, but there's a couple of points you glossed over...
4) SCSI has lower CPU overhead and doesn't make your system slug along as the kernel babysits the disk transfers.
Almost every bit of ATAPI kit out there these days uses DMA, which has made a big difference. It's not like the old days when you could see your CPU usage peak during a long copy operation. That said, SCSI still handles multiple requests better.
5) SCSI disks are usually made with higher MTBFs in mind.
True at one time, but many of the SCSI drives out there now are almost identical to their ATAPI counterparts, except for the interface.
Re:SCSI Still Better (Score:2)
I'm still gonna go SCSI on my next box. Configuration? You do it once, what's the big deal? 127 devices? I won't have more than 15, you can hang 15 off just about any SCSI card these days. And it'll leave my CPU to do more important things.
WD && SCSI didn't mix (Score:3)
I've got 4 SCSI one drives, a SCSI-2 Seagate Barracuda, a UW SCSI IBM (9zx), Yamaha CDRW.. my brother has two Seagate 4gb, and two Yamahas, and my mother has a SCSI caddy cdrom. And of course there's lots of IDEs laying around (hdds, cdroms, CDR, DVD), and a few MFMs, plus a prop. 1x sony cdrom.
Problems with SCSI:
1. Barracuda came defective. Same with Yamaha. Both from a really bad reseller who gave me a bad controller (defective), and claimed Seagate's tech. was lying and the drives really were out of production. Took 3 months to clear up.
2. IBM over heated, and eventually died months afterwards. IBM replaced within a week, the data was recoverable. The drive was 1st generation 10k rpm, and a pre-release w/ updated rom.
3. For some reason my brother's Yamaha CDR102 wont write onto newer cd media. Seems to be a cd-design change, as old media works fine.
4. Always requiring innovative tweaks to keep cool. SCSI caddy cdrom (6Plex) overheated and was replaced for free, years ago.
5. Pain to get UNIXes to install with the Yamaha. They'll boot off cd, and then say there's no CDROM to install from.
On non-SCSI problems:
1. Connar 1.4gb drive had bad blocks, years later stopped functioning.
2. 8x cdrom 'kinda' works.
3. 10/12x cdrom sticks.
So, there are more difficulties on SCSI, but cabling and installation is easier. Cooling is just a pain. Performance, though, is high. My Barracuda 2lp still outperforms IDEs in cpu/speed. The IBM is so fast I feel bad having it... Still, its amazing seeing 10% cpu used, max, when 100% is used on IDE, like the few DMA/33s I have.
SCSI for home = waste
SCSI for workstations = ok-good (mostly useful if the CAD is CPU oriented)
SCSI for servers = good-great (depends on what the server is doing, load, etc).
Just an anon that's really bored....
IDE benchs (Score:5)
I've found the IDE performance problems go away entirely with the correct bus-mastering settings. You still can't get decent performance with two drives on a single channel, but my new Abit motherboard came with four IDE channels. So you can have four IDE hard drives without losing performance.
Here are some real benchmarks to back this up:
[root@olympus /root]# /sbin/hdparm -c0 -d0 -k1 -m0 -W0 /dev/hda /root]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda: /root]# /sbin/hdparm -c1 -d1 -k1 -m16 -W1 /dev/hda /root]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
<snip>
[root@olympus
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 28.40
seconds = 2.25 MB/sec
[root@olympus
<snip>
[root@olympus
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.86
seconds =13.17 MB/sec
That's with a 7200 Seagate drive. The first benchmark, giving a whopping 2.25MB/sec, was with all the IDE options in sucky mode. This is the way older IDE controllers work, and in large part responsible for IDE's bad name. The second benchmark shows that it can have good performance. It's CPU performance wasn't as good as SCSI's (17% out of 200%; dual-processor box) but wasn't as bad as many have said.
Is SCSI still necessary?! (Score:4)
The big trouble with IDE is still that they are "dumb" devices that require CPU resources to manage. On workstations doing lots of disk access I can see NOTICABLE performance degradation between similar hardware, one of which is IDE, the other of which is SCSI. The nicest thing about SCSI is the fact that the controller offloads all disk management off of the system's CPU. If you're doing power computing, this makes a big difference. Also, as someone else mentioned, IDE has real problems allowing the system to manipulate multiple drives simultaneously, a problem SCSI does not have. For some schmuck just dicking around with Netscape so they can browse the web, who cares, but for hardcore users with big machines trying to get real work done, it can make a legitimate difference.
From a server perspective, there's no question that SCSI is the best. Just TRY putting more than four IDE drives into a Linux box without tearing your hair out and threatening to take a shotgun to the thing. The only way to do it is to get some sort of additional IDE controller like the Promise controllers which are unmitigated junk. I don't even want to mention the hoops I've gone through to to get a Promise Ultra33 stable in my Linux server. What makes it worse is that I could buy the four IDE drives I put in there for about the same price as I would have been able to pick up two SCSI drives of about the same size. (It's not that SCSI is so tremendously expensive as much as it is that IDE is just dirt cheap.) More unfortunately, I needed the space and I didn't have the extra money, or I *would* have just gone with SCSI. (As it turns out, I spent so much time trying to get the IDE drives working, I probably *should* have just gone SCSI from the get-go and saved myself money in the long run from doctor's bills from high blood pressure and ulcers trying to build an IDE-based server will give me.)
I see the whole "IDE vs. SCSI" thing as yet another case of mediocrity winning the battle. It doesn't have to be great as long as it's cheap and good enough to get the public to buy it. For those of us who like quality, we just have to pay so much more. Unfortunately, unlike the software industry, there's no way to start an "Open Source/Free Hardware" movement to force the other manufacturers to start focusing higher on quality.
-=-=-=-=-
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:2)
- UDMA cpu usage is comparable to SCSI.
- The multitasking restriction is that IDE cannot issue more than 1 io request at a time, but this doesn't matter for single disk systems.
- The only essential difference between a SCSI HD and an IDE one is the drive electronics, they are physically identical.
This last point brings up an interesting facet of this announcement: the only reason SCSI disks are more expensive is because all the manufacturers make both IDE and SCSI disks, so they market the SCSI as "power-user" and "enterprise". The only reason we don't have 10,000 RPM IDE drives today is marketing.--
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
If ATAPI were done right, SCSI could die. But... (Score:2)
With ATAPI and LBA, what we essentially could have is the equivalent of SCSI but over a cheap cable with standard TTL drivers and no fancy termination (the things that make SCSI expensive). We could get nearly the same speeds -- or at least, we could if we were willing to put a single drive on each IDE interface (which certainly isn't out of the question).
Maybe, if it's dropping out of the SCSI business, WD can be persuaded to flesh out its ATAPI command sets so as to keep customers. Wouldn't hurt to ask.
--Brett Glass
SCSI is ALWAYS better (Score:3)
Now that he's gone and the SCSI business is a memory, you can all expect nothing but crap to come out of this company for years to come.
All of these posters talking about EIDE (or whatever this months incarnation of the ATA spec is) being better than SCSI have no clue what they are talking about. I use my computers alot. Anytime I sit down to a system with any type of IDE drive, I can immediately feel the sluggishness set in, all while the CPU wastes cycles babysitting the rather braindead disk channel. Server or not, SCSI systems are *always* better and I will *always* continue to pay the extra quid to be at the keyboard of a system that doesn't slow me down. For me, that's not EIDE - ever.
Case in point: my shiny new Dell 600MHz system with the best Dell has to offer in EIDE technology. Many fingertip tappings waiting for the fluttering of the hard drive to settle down whilst I work. To me, that's not good technology or a good use of my time. At my earliest conveinance, I'll be swapping out the disc subsytem in favor of something with 80 pins and real bandwidth capability.
Re:The less drives WD makes, the better! (Score:3)
I used to work at a computer company in the St. Louis, Mo area. We used WD drives exclusively. We got word that they had "oops"'d and that we have 30 to 50 IDE drives that we had to ship back to WD - AT OUR COST - even though it was thier defect. Needless to say, we switched to Fujitsu and never looked back, simply returning the drives and demanding a refund.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
There's more difference than just the interface (Score:3)
A lot of people use this EIDE crap, thinking it's great for a server and what not, after all it works for their desktop. It's not.
While I'll admit, there are some SCSI disks which are differentiated from the IDE drives solely by their interface, the higher end SCSI disks usually do have some serious advantages.
Some of the bigger SCSI advantages are
the fact of the matter is that if you want a cheap drive, you can buy a cheap EIDE drive, or a cheap SCSI drive. if you want a *good* drive, ultra-high quality EIDE drives are virtually non-existant, leaving you with good ole' SCSI.
A lot of people have this odd notion that when two computers are PIII 600s with 256 megs RAM and 18 gigs hard drive, but one costs $500 more, that the more expensive one is automatically a ripoff. People seem to forget that sometimes the more expensive one has better components and is less likely to die and wipe out the past two weeks of work. (all you non-student types, how much did you make in the past two weeks? I'd bet a *lot* more than $500). We need less ads that say the price, and more like the great VA Linux ad with the steak dinner on one page, and the TV dinner on the other.
Why SCSI is now useless... (Score:2)
So, in terms of performance, is it worth the several hundred $ extra per hard disk? No. Purchasing a 25% faster CPU for several hundred extra dollars is the better long-term solution, because each time you need to add a new HD or replace an aging one you save the $$$ overhead you'd be paying for the additional SCSI drives.
No one ever said the most technologically sophisticated solution is the best solution--it's not. A 70s muscle car will generally kick the ass of a 90s sports car. The same is true with computer hardware, which is why commodity IBM clones have consistently kicked the ass of more elegant PPC boxes and even SPARCs and Alphas--sure, Alpha is the fastest thing this side of whatever the NSA's private little fab is putting out, but for the price of a smooth-as-silk Alpha or SPARC server, you could have built the ass-kickingest SMP x86 box--or two. Sure, SCSI will give you a performance boost--but you could get more processing power and more disk space with IDE 66; the processor power advantage would be nullified by the IDE pull on the CPU, but that still leaves you with more disk space.
More is better, right? So unless you want to serve pages from that pathetic 2GB SCSI disk all your life, because you can't afford to add more SCSI drives, just ride the ATA66 revolution. If you can afford mondo SCSI disk space anyway--go with IDE and get yourself some more bandwidth or throw in more RAM.
Thing is, with a computer there are always trade-offs, always several things you could get to improve performance. Few if any of us here have unlimited wallets--SCSI is dead. SCSI is the past. In the future, for the highest-end most expensive hard disks, we'll have FireWire or some other high speed standard--not SCSI. And for all other applications, IDE 66 and successors will be the way to go. The revolution's on, folks--all that stuff we've been using for 20 years is going by the wayside: x86 architecture (at least as we know it--maybe Sledgehammer and Crusoe will make it more serviceable), Microsoft operating systems, ISA slots, SCSI, and I wish my old college would hurry up and get rid of that ancient VAX, too.
WD Drive = Crash Test Dummy. (Score:4)
I worked for a Computer Repair shop for about 5 months now. Here's the Breakdown on the Brand Names of Drives that come in Crashed that I've seen so far.
90% Western Digital - at least 20 that I can think of offhand
8% JTS (which are out of business) - 2 of these
2% Seagate - I know of 1 that had bad sectors
As of yet I've seen no Maxtor, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum, Samsung or any other manufacture's hard drive crash. Although I've heard alot of bad things about the Maxtor Drives and the Quantum Bigfoot's Crashing. and I know from personal Experience that some old IBM Drives, (and I'm talking 10-15 year old PS/2 Hard Drives) were crap.
We would sometimes get WD drives that came fresh out of a box, stick it in a machine, and it would be damaged. My boss Had to deal with a company for a week because They bought a WD Enterprise Drive for their mission critial Server and it crashed. It Wasn't even a year old!
If I had a choice of any drive today, Hands Down I would have to go with the IBM Drive. If I had a second choice, I would probably go with a Samsung or a fujitsu.
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
--
Fibre Channel > SCSI > EIDE (Score:5)
SCSI may seem to be "too much" for the average user but in that as the old MTV logo used to say..."Too much is never enough!" This held true for music television and it holds true for computers. I remember getting time on a 386 SX 25 Mhz with 4MB RAM and 80 MB hard disk. This was a $10,000+ system at the time. Now it's a paper weight for all but a few geeks (like me) who love to find uses for old hardware. I have a few IDE paper weights...I will have a few more before they are done.
Re:No SCSI? (Score:3)
Re:HOW IS THAT FLAMEBAIT? (Score:2)
Almost guaranteed the mod didn't read the context of that post
-- posted by a responsible moderator, which seems to be why I get mod access more than I'd like to =)
Perhaps yes, Perhaps no. (Score:2)
You can argue that your personal system downtime costs nothing, but that assumes that a) you don't value your time or you like spending it rebuilding systems or b) that you don't do anything worthwhile on your computer anyway. If these are true, then buy the cheapest thing you can find. Otherwise, I suggest looking at the MTBFs and realizing that about half the drives fail before that time.
Re:HOW IS THAT FLAMEBAIT? (Score:2)
Moderate him up! (Score:3)
One last flag you might want to try: -X34 will make sure the drive is set to DMA mode 2 transfers, and on new drives -X66 will select Ultra DMA transfers. DMA->UDMA isn't nearly as big a leap as PIO->DMA, but it's sizable.
I wish more people knew about hdparm - it's a single command you can run as root that can double the performance of your system under some circumstances. I think new kernels are getting more aggressive about enabling good IDE settings themselves, but there are still too many systems out there where the default settings needlessly give both Linux and IDE a bad name.
Of course it will... (Score:3)
No threat to SCSI (Score:2)
All in all, there are enough other choices that I don't think Western Digital will be missed in the SCSI world.
Re:SCSI Still Better (Score:2)
I love SCSI. Specially nice LVD IBM drives. :)
Kidding me? (Score:2)
Re:Rant (Score:2)
Re: some additional comments (Score:2)
ata hard drives have historically been slower than scsi hard drives. But recently, they have been catching up. ATA/IDE drives now use busmastering and dma, making the cpu utilization less. The speed of the interface has also been increasing, up to 66 mb/s, beating ultrawide scsi 2 which was state of the art about two years ago before lvd scsi arrived. Of course, this is just the interface itself, the actually speed still depend on the hard drive itself. A few years back, IDE hard drives were running at 5200/5400 rpm and had 128k/256k buffers. Currently, IDE hard drives run up to 7200 rpm and has 2 megs of buffers and a 10 gb/in^2 areal density, whereas SCSI hard drives have up to 10000 rpm (giving them lower latency and stuff) and a 4/8 meg buffer (mostly on AV optimized models) but only a 3.3 gb/in^2 areal density. Anyway, the point of all that was to say IDE hard drives are catching up.
Back to the interface:
scsi can go up to 45 devices per card (3 channel UW card, 15 devices per channel) or more realisticly - 15 devices per card, on a single channel UW scsi card - totally beats IDE's 4 devices per card/motherboard limitaion. but what about those ABIT motherboards with 4 ide channels or the ability to add on a PCI ide card? you can argue this will use up all the irqs but PCI irqs can be shared. Then there's USB/Firewire, which allows up to 127 and 63 devices respectively. USB ports are standard on all PCs since around 97 and they can be used for low speed pheripherals such scanners or zip drives. Firewire is available on various compaq/other name brand pcs, as well as some Macintoshes and can be added onto any pc through a firewire card (adaptec makes them AFAIK and they are commercially available) and firewire has the bandwidth to support high speed hard drives and other pheripherals. With all this, shouldn't scsi be obselete by now? (Yes, I know scsi hard drives are still the fastest, adn I understand SCSI is necessary for hardware raid 5, and SCSI hard drives have a higher MTBF - all of this is critial to mid/high end servers) but what about the low end server / workstation market? (where price may be an issue, btw, I'm ruling out the home pc market because the _ordinary_ user doesn't have 5 hard drives and a scanner, and a cd burner, and etc, etc)
which brings me to my next point:
scsi is incredibly expensive. yes, there are cheap (7200 rpm) scsi hard drives out there (still $200+ though) and there are cheap scsi controllers (tekram - $170 aint bad) but 7200 rpm scsi hard drives dont give the performance advantage to justify the additional price (10000 rpm hard drives start at $350) and the tekram scsi cards (they provide linux drivers, cool eh) are only up to 80 mb/s, not 160 mb/s (the new adaptec cards - which are REALLY expensive - the scsi card alone can buy 20gb - 30gb worth of IDE hard drives) so looking at the cost effectiveness of the scsi hard drives - they are not really worth it for low end servers / workstations now are they? (the cost is worth it for high end servers, especially if they run anything critial where maybe a business is depending on the speed and reliability)
just a little note: by "workstations" i'm also including people's high end machines and those ultimate gaming rigs...
now, back to slacking off, for I've got senioritis maximus =)
_______________________________________________
There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
Making IDE "better" is like beating a dead horse (Score:4)
Face it, the IDE design is ancient and is inadequate for today's uses. I mean its fine when you are plain ol' Joe Bob who just checks his email and does word processing. But when you want to *add* something to the computer and do some serious stuff, like a geek will, you're running into problems.
Not only does IDE have bad command queuing, it doesn't even do sync transfers. The most debated issue is the CPU usage and the transfer rate: IDE relies on the CPU more than it should because the controller is too simple and therefore braindead. You can overclock the IDE controller, but what always happens is the drive is too crappy to even handle the higher speed, but you always get the same read performance. IDE always sends date from devices back to the host controller at the same original spec speed, whereas write-to-device can vary due to oc'ing the controller.
Ok, now to the point:
the engineers (I'm sure they've been TOLD to do this) keep trying to make IDE "better" by keeping this backwards compatiblity junk and at the same time trying to squeeze a wider data bandwidth for the devices. Think about ATA/66, you need those special 80 wire/40 pin cables because if you used a regular 40 pin/wire cable the signal to noise ratio will be so bad that you get tons of CRC errors. The additional wiring are for the extra shielding in order to keep the SNR well enough to avoid CRC problems. What about adding additional devices for more storage space and removable like what most of us geeks do? Okay, they draw up these brilliant schemes of secondary, tertiary, and quarternary controllers which are essentially the same in controller design as the "primary" except on a different IRQ and port. Wow, cool, now I can hook up 8 IDE devices!
Ok, but I want to add some stuff like: a PCI soundcard (2 IRQs... 1 for ISA/DOS emu, and 1 for actual PCI), add NIC (there goes another IRQ), add DVD decoder card (1 IRQ). Hmmm... wait a minute, isn't IDE 0-3 using IRQ 10,11,14,15 already? So didn't that left me with IRQ 9 for video? Ok, suppose I _DON'T_ even have a NVidia based video card (which has problems sharing IRQs), and try to share IRQ 9 through "PCI steering" with the USB, also; that only gets me 2 devices working. I still have to disable the serial port(s), and the parallel port to get more of this working. It is possible to have one of the devices' IRQs share with the other, however this is all determined by the BIOS's DMI these days (in a modern PCI BIOS at least). I'm only talking about PCI here, ISA is already a forgotten issue since I'm talking about the latest and "greatest" motherboard.
Aren't they trying to keep some ancient inferior, simple interface up to date and competitive just because its "cheaper"? AFAIK, it should cost no more to make a SCSI device/drive with the *same* MTBF rating as an IDE device. IDE works, only when you are keeping things *simple*, but things aren't so simple these days. The more expensive, branded, prebuilt *gasp* systems these days already come with a decent sized HD, with DVD, and usually a burner, and sometimes a Zip or LS-120. This means 2 IDE channels may already taken up. IDE seems cost effective, but it doesn't look like it to me when it comes to long term. Its more trouble than its worth when you are going to add cards into your slots. Doesn't this remind you of the saying "beating a dead horse" to you?
It all comes down to this: we all know that we are in a serious IRQ resource problem already, and adding to that we get "newer and better" IDE "standards" which contributes to this problem even more. What I think should be done is to either ditch IDE (it worked great as a cheap solution but is no longer really viable), or take care of the IRQ problem. However, there is one thing that seem to be preventing this: the industry thinks they need to maintain backwards compatibility. I feel that there will eventually come a day where someone out there in some company will crack and actually officially acknowledge of this problem and is actually willing to deal with it.
My strongly suggested action is to actually make SCSI cheaper (man, they make tons of money selling those things, when costs of manf are no more than IDE), thus allowing IDE to be rid of, and in turn allow us to connect at least 15 devices (Wide SCSI) and using only 1 controller, 1 IRQ, 1 port, and lower CPU usage tremendously.
I still have to admit that IDE is ideal for people, and some of the geeks out there who are poor and can't afford good stuff like SCSI. But the minute you can afford and want to do serious (workstation/server) stuff, there is no doubt about it: SCSI is the way to go.
TheMAN
Re:BOTTOM LINE: EIDE blows SCSI/Fibre away (Score:2)
He used to do long rants (if it is him) about "Sun and HP should just acknowledge that Linux/Intel has won, and absolutely smokes them everywhere, everyhow".
"Linux, Intel and EIDE are what power the Enterprise Storage/RAID Market"???
Re:SCSI: What's the Big Deal? (Score:2)
"We have an 8 speed IDE CD drive here, and we have a 2 speed SCSI CD drive too. If you're looking for the top speed, SCSI is much more powerful than IDE, but you do need to buy this controller card... Oh, good, I have a few in stock"
The one time I've stepped in and told this customer he was talking crap. Dealer wasn't amused, but like I gave a shit, that is just pure scammery.
Re:WD && SCSI didn't mix (Score:2)
I had this problem. Hunt down a firmware upgrade and I almost guarantee your troubles will be over.
Re:No SCSI? (Score:2)
If you want the most G/$, then yes, IDE is the choice. However, "you get what you pay for." IDE _is_ slower than SCSI and much more likely to fail. I still have a Maxtor LXT-213S, 213M SCSI-1 (CCS) drive. That drive is over 10 years old and is still purring along -- it's living up to its MTBF.
Re:Moderate him up! (Score:2)
The same goes for WinNT as it goes for Linux. DMA makes the difference. Look at www.arstechnica.com to see how to turn it on, it's not as easy as Linux, but it can be done.
----------------------------------------------
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Also, if you stick with SCSI drives from good companies (apparently just IBM now
So, for systems that multitask with disk activity (lots of OSs now), and with drives that typify SCSI, rather than random "I can sell SCSI drives now" vendors, SCSI is still better. Expensive, but worth it.
(Deleted rant on SCSI vs. IDE installation since it was too angry
Bah
Re:No SCSI? (Score:2)
That's where SCSI shines. Not on reliability- not one bit. But it does offer preformance advantages. And, not that most techheads care, but IDE is easier to plug in. Of course, there is only 1 more step in SCSI than in IDE, and it consists of selecting a unique SCSI channel... a no-brainer anyway...
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:3)
And in general, single disk systems are peecees, not workstations or servers. So, thanks for playing.
Yes, in many cases the drives are physically identical. So why don't we have 10k rpm ide drives? It might be marketing - or it might be that the vendors aren't going to waste the cost and effort to build those fast drives on ide. After all, systems with only ide are unlikely to get any increased benefit from additional media speed, and people who buy them aren't likely to be willing to pay the difference in disk cost.
You're forgetting the fundamental basis of peecee buyers: the only thing that matters is the ratio of $IMPORTANT_NUMBER to price. In this case, disk size. Nobody quotes MB/s or seek times or the crucial "platter to ethernet" time. Why? Because people buying biddy boxes don't give a fsck.
Re:Fibre Channel > SCSI > EIDE (Score:2)
I've seen storage arrays that used SSA internally and Fiber Channel externally, big things the size of an outhouse. near-terabyte to multi-terabyte stuff.
Re:Kidding me? (Score:2)
Yes, SCSI is expensive compared to IDE, from an end-user point of view.
But the host isn't anywhere near that pricy. Well, it doesn't have to be.
Symbios (NCR) scsi host adapter ICs are actually pretty good stuff. HP, IBM, Compaq, AMI, all use them on their RAID controllers.
Sure, you could spend $200 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, but you could also spend $150 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, and only be almost as foolish.
Adaptec has impeccable marketing, as scsi vendors go. Their products, however, are middle of the road.
SIIG, Initio, the performance isn't horrible but the quality is questionable. The pricing is competitive, but not fantastic.
BusLogic/Mylex, may be a notch above Initio/SIIG due merely for the fact that wars rage over whether or not BusLogic/Mylex cards are a lot better.
but Symbios, man, pound for pound, if budget is a concern, is the only way to go.
I'm typing this now on a machine sporting a Symbios SYM83c875 ultra-wide scsi host. Cost: $47.
And it even feels faster than the same drive did when it was on an Adaptec AIC7880 (aka 2940UW)
The drives, yes, they are more expensive, but keep an eye out for SCA drives and 80-64 pin adapters. Ultra/Wide scsi is quickly falling by the wayside in RAID arrays due to the lowering cost of LVD, and SCA interfaced UW drives are selling quite cheap at the surplus joints. I'm talking $345 for 18 gig 7200rpm IBM UltraStar.
Yeah, it's more expensive than IDE, but it's always been worth it in my experience.
Lets fire up your IDE system and watch you burn a CD on your IDE CD-R while ripping audio tracks off your IDE CD-ROM while encoding MP3 off your IDE harddrive while playing Quake II. I've done this on my dual celeron UW SCSI system more than once, system didn't even break a sweat.
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:3)
The SCSI drives have high rotational rates (measured in RPM) and latency, and the IDE drives have much higher Areal Density (loosely measured in GB per platter).
This is lifted from a page at www.storagereview.com:
"The primary way that hard disks have been increased in capacity and speed over the years is by storing more and more information into the same physical space. This is done by increasing how tightly packed together the bits on the disk are, which is the areal density or bit density of the platters."
The differences in the two types of drives even out in situations where there is one drive per controller (and CPU usage is almost identical).
(Also note, that for the price of one SCSI controller, you can buy quite a few IDE controllers, most of which have 2 controllers per card, so 4 disks would only take up 2 PCI slots, one if you also use the onboard controllers that usually come on motherboards..)
For more info, check out this section of www.storagereview.com:
http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_int_pe
Re:SCSI Still Better (Score:2)
Hell, even Sun is using IDE hardware now -- even in things called "server". It's saving them, what, 12$ per 3000$ machine by not putting a SCSI controller on there? I gave up a 366MHz Ultra10 in favor of a 167MHz Ultra1 at work to get back to SCSI -- the U10 paid too much of a penalty for being IDE based (and yes, it was _very_ noticable.)
Re:Rant (Score:2)
(and the fastest IDE and SCSI drives are curently almost the same speed...)
Re: some additional comments (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, USB is great for a lot of things. I wish every digital camera had a USB port, etc. For moving relatively small chunks of data (50 megs or less), USB is a great way to do things.
But sheesh, that's 12 mega *BITS*, and it's a *SERIAL* interface. Divide by eight, then account for bus latency. Then compare it to the ATA-1 speed limitations. Yeah, a hard drive on USB would be soooo cool.
Firewire is interesting, arguably in the same class as some forms of scsi, especially in regards to price.
hdparm - more details.. (Score:4)
This tip is useful for just about any Linux box, and is probably the
simplest way to significantly speed up your IDE based Linux box
without changing the hardware.
If you are impatient then just add the following near the top of your
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (or equivalent startup script):
/sbin/hdparm -u 1 -d 1
/sbin/hdparm -u 1 -d 1
(and so on for any IDE devices in your system)
Now for a more complete explanation.
By default Linux uses extremely conservative settings for IDE. In
particular the default settings do two things that make IDE perform
really badly:
1) DMA is not used. That means all data coming to/from the hard disk
or cdrom is processed a byte at a time by the CPU. That is not very
efficient. With a fast processor that isn't doing anything else at
the time this can appear fast in simple minded benchmarks but it is
a big drain on CPU resources when you are actively using the
machine.
2) hardware interrupts are masked during IDE transfers. That means
that while a lump of data is being transferred to/from a IDE device
no other interrupts are processed. This includes interrupts from
other IDE devices, from network devices, from serial ports and from
mice. Your whole machine is effectively clagged up doing nothing
but waiting for a horrendously slow device to say "I'm done". Not
good.
If you want to see just how slow this is on your system then do the
following:
1) put a CDROM in the drive.
2) run the following commands:
hdparm -d 0 -u 0
hdparm -d 0 -u 0
cat
hdparm -t
hdparm -d 1 -u 1
hdparm -d 1 -u 1
hdparm -t
that shows you the hard disk speed while accessing the CDROM with the
default settings and with the improved settings. On my system the hard
disk speed goes from 3.8 MB/sec to 12.9 MB/sec. I've seen much bigger
changes on some other systems.
Even more importantly than the speedups is the fact that you will stop
dropping your PPP connection while doing cdrom transfers, and you will
be able to use your system while burning a cdrom without creating a
coaster.
You may wonder why the default settings are so poor. The reason is
that there is some rare hardware out there that corrupts data during
IDE transfers when you either use DMA or receive an interrupt during a
transfer. If that happens then the kernel should detect the failure
(in nearly every case) and fall back to the default
settings. Unfortunately after the auto-fallback you are still left
with corrupt data in your cache. Luckily systems that don't handle DMA
and unmasked interrupts are really quite rare these days so it is a
pretty safe bet to turn the options I suggested above, especially if
your system isn't from the stone age.
For more info and piles of options for fine tuning your IDE system try
"man hdparm".
Re:What about IEEE 1394 (Score:2)
Pros and Cons of IDE vs SCSI today (Score:3)
7200rpm + U/ATA66 can sustain some wickedly fast speeds. For this reason I chose this on an Abit BE6 motherboard and cheap 7200rpm IDE drives for my cheap budget server at my cash strapped school.
I was astounded when I ran an hdparm -t (without cache disk speed test) and it reported 21MB/sec. This went well beyond my expectations from a little cheap IDE drive.
In situations where you only have one disk per controller (the Abit BE6 has two U/ATA 66 controllers), 7200rpm IDE can actually outperform SCSI based systems. (According to an article on Thresh's Firing Squad)
HOWEVER, SCSI still beats the heck out of IDE in reliability, speed and scalability in large and important jobs (enterprise solutions). The redundancy and failover protection of SCSI + raid controllers is not as reliable with IDE (it's possible with stupid human tricks). Don't even talk to me about software RAID. Software RAID is too CPU intensive. SCSI + RAID controllers can do all the failover, drive rebuilding and cool stuff without the CPU knowing anything about it.
Also, the extra bandwidth of SCSI shines when many hard disks are added to the fray. IDE has nowhere near the level of scalability of SCSI.
So basically, I highly suggest U/ATA 66 IDE for desktops, workstations and low budget servers. But for large and important jobs use SCSI.
Re:Is SCSI still necessary?! (Score:2)
SCSI also requires "CPU" resources, the difference being that SCSI controllers take care of the details themselves instead of nagging the main CPU for attention. Bus-mastering DMA controllers have gone some way towards removing this overhead.
I don't see why you couldn't build a "smart" IDE disk controller that places no more load on the system that a SCSI controller, or even one that looks like a SCSI controller to the computer, but uses IDE disks (so long as you have room on the card, give them all a dedicated IDE channel, too.) The price difference between the drives should pay for the controller!
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:2)
Yes, this matters for single-disk systems. You send several requests to the disk. The disk will then process request 2 while transferring the data read in request 1 (or while receiving the data you are writing for request 1)
This improves your read bandwidth a lot, particularly when using good read-ahead algorithms. It makes a difference. It will also improve write bandwith in high-load situations, i.e. when you're writing at the platter bandwith for long enough time to fill the on-disk ram cache and more.
3.The only essential difference between a SCSI HD and an IDE one is the drive electronics, they are physically identical.
Sure. The scsi advantage is in the interface. Now, if at least one manufacturer would see the light and sell them at the same price...
IDE would be gone in a few years, and they would save money on not developing IDE anymore.
Re:Making IDE "better" is like beating a dead hors (Score:2)
IDE: 2 IRQ's, 4 devices. Thats
SCSI: 1 IRQ, 30 devices. 0.03 IRQ/Device.
From
15: 263999 XT-PIC aic7xxx, sym53c8xx
PLEASE DONT LET THEM KILL SCSI!
Re:IDE may be cheaper, but.. (Score:2)
Replacing the control board.. (Score:3)
Any thoughts?
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Re:WD Drive = Crash Test Dummy. (Score:2)
Recently a friend's company had a spate of Samsung drives go down, most less than a month old.
These days I consciously choose better quality disks because the extra cost is considerably less than the cost of a lost customer, or even having to go out and swap a disk in a hurry. Disks are about the only critical mechanical parts left in a modern computer (except bl**dy chip-fans), and are among the things most likely to die. Buying cheap ones is (in my opinion) a very poor economy.
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:4)
This is correct, but it doesn't capture the whole picture. Only fools and zealots can argue that IDE Tech is as good as SCSI Tech. The advantages of SCSI are obvious. SCSI allows more disks, more cabling distance, much more bandwith, less cpu usage, and you could go on. The real question has always been who cares?
Technological superiority is a terrible to buy something. (Unless you're a nerd buying a gadget just to have it that is) When you make real purchases you buy whatever fits your needs and your budget the best. Any tech superiority you pay for but don't use is nothing more than Gold-Plating. A gold plated computer might look great, but unless that gold plating is used for something it's pretty dumb.
When people say that IDE Tech is catching up to SCSI tech, what they really mean is that IDE capability to satisfy thier needs is catching up to SCSI's ability to satisfy them. Personally I often wish I had bought SCSI so I could put more devices on a single controller. Then I look at the prices for certain SCSI HD's. I remember why I choose IDE in the first place, and I don't feel so bad.
8/16 ID's != 7/15 devices (Score:2)
Eg, Ultra will not really tolerate more than 4 devices on a bus. It's possible to have 5 or 6 Ultra devices on the same bus, but you are likely to have problems.
The WD clunk of death (Score:2)
Now, the new Expert line is a different story. They're licensed from IBM technology and should be just as reliable.
Re:IDE may be cheaper, but.. (Score:2)
I have nothing connected to it so it's not activated.
Maybe I was a little unclear then.
Re:Kidding me? (Score:2)
Drives: I haven't touched an EIDE in many years, I've used Seagate, Quantum and IBM drives. Definitely love the IBM, dead silent. (Anything to reduce the noise from the PCs in my bedroom is A Good Thing(tm)).
Re:Moderate him up! (Score:2)
I've had five go bad. (Score:2)
To their credit, they replaced all of the drives I've had go bad (one even went bad in the first six months). But I don't even use the replacements, one of them is still ni shrink wrap even, because I don't trust my data on a Western Digital drive.
IDE advantage: inexpensive! (Score:3)
I think many of you are missing the point.
The big advantage of IDE is simple: low cost. Remember, in the old days you had to buy a separate hard disk controller, and that hogged valuable expansion slot space (not to mention the time wasted in doing a low-level format of a hard drive.)
Since IDE drives don't need a separate controller card (and don't need low-level formats), all you need to do in 1999 is connect the drive to the motherboard (heck, even the system BIOS will automatically set up the drive type), and you can right there install the operating system of your choice.
Also, in the past people have rightly criticized about IDE drive's low performance compared to SCSI drives. However, with Intel shipping the 82371 series of I/O controller chips, that allows software drivers to be written that dramatically reduce the CPU utilization to access an IDE drive. Also, the development of Programmed I/O Mode 4 in the early 1990's, ATA-33 in 1996 and ATA-66 in 1999 has dramatically increased throughput on IDE hard drives to the point that for most desktop operating systems there is almost nothing to be gained by going to SCSI hard drives.
The only place where SCSI hard drives still are useful are in environments where hard disk access is very heavy, such as in servers. This is where the RAID 5 capability of modern SCSI host adapters and the throughput of SCSI Ultra-Wide and Ultra2-Wide becomes useful.
It's small wonder why Western Digital is no longer interested in SCSI hard drives. That's because IDE hard drive technology has advanced to the point that SCSI hard drives are only useful for server environments.
So to sum up this whole discussion... (Score:3)
IDE Fanatic: IDE is cheaper.
SCSI Fanatic: Oh yeah????? Well my drive rotates at 20,000 gigaschmirkels per second and I can chain ***37*** DRIVES TOGETHER!
IDE Fanatic: IDE is cheaper.
SCSI Fanatic: So, my mega-ultra-fat-wide-giga-fast-scsi-4 drive can do simultaneous reads and writes and can reorder requests fast enough to pilot the space shuttle - LETS SEE YOUR IDE DRIVE DO THAT!!!! AHHAAHAAHAAHHAHAHHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAH AHA!
IDE Fanatic: IDE is cheaper.
Do you see what I am getting at? Nobody is saying IDE is technically better, yet all these wonderful SCSI fans are screaming until they turn blue in the face and the veins in their forehead start bulging out. Frankly it's disgusting.
Stop it.
I mean it.
I can still see your veins.
I wasn't joking.
Re:No SCSI? (Score:2)
UDMA66 drives CAN transfer upto 66MB/sec. Currently generation IDE drives sustained transfer rates are just above 34MB/sec but can burst data at 66MB/sec.
Additionaly there are only 2 IDE drives per channel. That is if 2 drives are both working at the same time the max bandwith on the whiore is 66MB/sec.
ULTRA/160.. um those drives don't transfer at 160MB/sec. 160MB/sec is just the max bandwith of the bus. SCSI drives are still limited by the same read/write channel as IDE drives.. which means they too can only stream around 34-35MB/sec right now.
NOW ULTRA/160 can have up to 16 devices (ok 15 without counting the controller) so 160/16 = 10MB/sec. So if you have 15 drives on a single SCSI channel none of the drives can transfer faster then 10MB/sec (if they are all talking at the same time).
IDE is perfect if you don't need more then 160Gigs worth of storage (40Gig x 4 drives) And BTW you can;t tell the diferance in speed between a 7200RPM ide drive in UDMA mode 4 and a 7200 SCSI drive.
Ex-Nt-User
My favorite thing about IDE over SCSI (Score:2)
How many different types of SCSI cable are there, between original SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra Wide Scsi, etc.?
I can still use the same 1GB drive that I had on my 486/33, on my much newer PII/450. And I can use the same cable. This makes me happy. The fact that IDE is also cheaper than SCSI makes me happy.
Now, if the SCSI advocates are only talking about practicality for high-load file servers, and server candy like hot-swappability, they have a point. But if they want to treat workstation practicality as being equivalent to server practicality, that's an all too common fallacy.
Re:No SCSI? (Score:3)
Further, it isn't SCSI that limits the speed of the drives, but rather the speed off the platter. The drives will BURST at 160 for blocks of data at some fraction of the size of the drives buffer.
So - then lets put 5 drives on the channel and stripe the data (can you say RAID) and you have
a high performance channel that will saturate PCI.
UDMA can't keep up with that.
Oh - I'm not really an expert in the stuff. I've just designed disk controller chips and an Ultra 160 host adapter.
Summary - Horse Hocky!
Serial buses ARE the future. (Score:2)
UDMA/66 on Linux? (Score:2)
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:2)
Thanks for saying this, now I don't feel as much like an idiot after reading through these posts.
I bought a SCSI drive and adapter after I ran into trouble with my PC being able to capture video over IEEE 1394 from my new digital camcorder. My PII-333 and WD udma-66/7200 drive dropped about 20% of the video frames. When I checked into this, the best advice I found was to go SCSI.
Adaptec makes a combo adapter that has Firewire as well as UW-SCSI interface (was coming up short on PCI slots) and I went with a Seagate Barracuda drive. I'm still using the IDE drive for running the machine since I've never had any trouble with it being fast enough for anything else, but now I'm using the SCSI drive to do the video capture and editing. This was an expensive way to go, but it sounds like the alternative might have been to upgrade the CPU to compensate for the IDE.
Re:My favorite thing about IDE over SCSI (Score:2)
SCSI subsystems usually feature more mature and faster chipsets and better busmastering, and SCSI controllers tend to load the CPU less than any IDE/EIDE controller I've ever used.
If your workstation is really a workstation, where you're doing local rendering or driving large compiles or anything which requires lots of CPU, and you're willing to pay for performance, SCSI still holds court on the top end. The difference now is that the top end is getting thinner and thinner as ATA continues to raise the bar.
Frinstance, when I finally buy my 2 HDDs for video editing (to mirror together), 99% sure they'll be ATA66 Quanta. If I was a video pro, though, and had the $$$ and needed to get 24bit uncompressed RGB video at 29.97fps, striping across 6-7 HDDs and having lots of controller cache would still mandate SCSI.
Still, it's not a religion, just stick with what's fast enough for your needs..
Your Working Boy,
Re:No SCSI? (Score:2)
I think many of you totally misunderstood my response and jumped on the flame wagon too quickly.
UDMA/66 means that a single IDE interface has 66mb of possible bandwidth to use. That means with two drives on the interface you'll max out if each drive is sustaining 33mb/sec of data.
It was created because UDMA/33 is slowly growing into becoming a bottleneck for today's faster IDE drives. If you have two drives capable of 16-17mb/sec sustained throughput, you'll max out the interface's possible throughput when both drives are in full utilization.
As for current IDE drives doing 34mb/sec sustained -- you're on absolute crack. There are currently no drives (IDE or SCSI, sans solid state drives) that are capable of average sustained transfer rates 34mb/sec. Go reach benchmarks. Burst mode is entirely different. As is sequential data access rates. Those are not real world benchmarks.
Currently the fastest drive on earth are the Quantum Atlas 10K drives. 24mb/sec sustained throughput. If I do a burst transfer or sequential access, the drive easily sucks down the full 80mb/sec of the entire U2W SCSI bus. That's why Ultra/160 is needed.
If you put 15 of these Atlas 10K drives on a single U2W SCSI chain and stripe the drives together and start copying large files, you'll hit the roof at 5mb/sec -- you'll flood the SCSI bus with no bandwidth left. Ultra/160 takes this limit up to 10mb/sec. That's a pretty big difference.
UDMA/66 gives you 66mb for two individual drives. So if you have two IDE drives, someday in the future when drives can actually go beyond 33mb/sec, running at max throughput -- you'll hit your limit.
And you're absolutely wrong when you talk about not being able to tell a difference. I went SCSI last year and I've never looked back. The speed and performance difference is absolutely incredible.
SCSI ***IS*** more reliable (Score:3)
I've read a ton of stuff on the debate about SCSI vs IDE...and I've seen some people comment on how "SCSI
seems to last longer" and I've seen other people comment on how "SCSI can handle multiple requests
better"...but I must confess, it took an electrical enginneer to explain to me the reason that SCSI blows IDE away in
servers, and always will: Let's start with the fact that most SCSI & IDE drives are identical in the hardware, it's
the logic board that's usually different. Both the SCSI drive and the IDE drive have the same MTBF. Which
drive is going to fail first in a server? The IDE will, every time -- BECAUSE IT WORKS HARDER, and
RUNS MORE. SCSI's ability to get multiple packets of data means the moving parts of the drive don't have to
work as hard as the IDE drive, which is sending the head flying over the platter for every little bit. Result? Two
servers, same workload, one with an IDE drive, one with a SCSI, both drives have the same MTBF...but the
IDE drive is chugging away to exhaustion while the SCSI drive caches some of the data it needs and is not
working nearly as hard. This is why the speed debate is useless as applied to servers. In a desktop? Sure, IDE
has its advantages, and big speed is always nice. But in a server in a business environment with a heavy
workload, time is the value, and downtime costs -- and that IDE drive is GOING to fail because it's working
10 times as hard as the SCSI drive is to get the same data. Now, if someone can just explain why it costs so
much more. I am inclined to agree with the previous poster who said that the hard drive companies just milk
the "business market" but I have no real facts to base that on
Re:The less drives WD makes, the better! (Score:2)
No, in my experience Maxtor and WD have always been the lowball price HDs at CompUSA, and the most prone to failure (I work summers at a computer reseller and fix broken computers, so I have actual experience with this, yes). My personal pick is Seagate.
Re:SCSI Still Better (Score:2)
Apple should take a page from their own book and drop the royalty -- the iMac's USB support, followed by Blue and White G3's created an instant explosion of USB devices which at least in theory should work for Macs and PC's.
In case you didn't know, the only difference between Mac modems and hardware PC modems was the serial cable connecting them. With USB, it's standardized -- one size fits all, without hardware/interface modification.
--
Re:WD Drive = Crash Test Dummy. (Score:3)
In the days of 200MB hard drives, Western Digital was king. They made solid, inexpensive, high-performance drives.
About the time of the 500MB hard drive, they started cheapening things up. Cache sizes were reduced, and while everyone else was looking towards a screaming 5400RPM, Western Digital stuck at 3600.
This seemed to peak about the time of the 1.2/1.6GB drives. These had a tiny, tiny cache and performed abysmally, despite the WD propaganda about how their 128K cache was somehow better than everyone else's 512K cache. The post-install failure rate from my experience was on the order of 20-30%, with an early-life failure rate of about 30-40%, based on about 200 sold.
About this time, Seagate was making a 1.0GB low-profile drive that was rock-solid. Of about 500 sold, I saw two go bad. I haven't gone back to Western Digital since.
When talking about drive reliability for a particular manufacturer, it's important to give a timeframe. Different manufacturers have been good at different times, and who is great one year might suck the next.
Re:Replacing the control board.. (Score:2)
I've been dreaming of this for years. The problem is the different natures of IDE and SCSI tech. I'm no expert, but IDE seems to depend on constant attention from the CPU. That means the the converter would have to include a stand-alone microprocessor and memory to handle the IDE controller, plus the SCSI controller to talk to the bus. A single-chip 486 with IDE and SCSI running some ultra-hacked software would do it, but there's no way it'd be cost effective.
On the bright side, you could map multiple IDE drives into a single SCSI ID (2 per IDE channel). A standard dual controller could handle 4 drives, but the SCSI bus would only see one ID. Might make for an amusing RAID/mirroring solution.
Re:IDE Hard Drive Tech is NOT catching up w/ SCSI (Score:2)
Go to www.storagereview.com, click on "database". and compare the two drives(or 3 if you want to include your old IDE) for yourself.. the tests are in NT and windows, but the performance is comparable in Linux(Follows the NT trends moslty).
Wow! That's intinuitive (Score:2)
I agree (Score:2)
When I got my IDE burner at home, I don't do anything while it's burning. sometimes I will read email, but that's only, like, once or twice. Coincidentally, I've never burnt a coaster with it.
direct impacts (Score:2)
SCSI (Score:2)
Re:Rant (Score:2)
Depends on what controllers you use...
You will spend $250 or so on SCSI controllers.. If you get 2 IDE controllers, and have one on each channel, will be about the same.
But, I agree that for any more then 4 IDE devices, this starts to get silly, and if you need more then 4 or maybe 6 hard drives or hot swap capability, go with SCSI, as that's not IDE's market..
However, current IDE fits 99% of end users needs, and is as fast without using up many irqs for up to 4 devices. High end servers who need more the this should pay out the nose for SCSI, or get redundant external fiber channel linked storage such as SUN provides(which use SCSI in the enclosure) and get REAL reliability and fail over...
Re:IDE advantage: inexpensive! (Score:2)
But for single-user desktop operating systems, today's ATA-66 IDE hard drives is more than enough for their needs. Remember, since Intel chipset motherboards usually sport a variant of the Intel 82371 I/O controller, this means you can write bus-mastering software drivers (regardless of operating system) that will dramatically reduce the CPU utilization during disk access, speeding up the computer.
It's only the high-end desktop computer user (e.g., people who work with big CAD/CAM or illustration files) where SCSI Ultra-Wide might become useful.
Re:The less drives WD makes, the better! (Score:2)
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!