Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 4 Dec 1998 10:05:11 +0100 | From | Kurt Garloff <> | Subject | Re: Dumb question: Which is "better" SCSI or IDE disks? |
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On Thu, Dec 03, 1998 at 12:12:03PM -0500, Russell Leighton wrote: > What are good rules of "thumb" for > choosing IDE vs SCSI when building > a Linux system?
IDE SCSI (1) Price ++ - (2) Speed + ++ (3) Speed when accessing more than one disk at a time - + (4) Extendability 4 7/15 (5) Reliability o +
For a home machine, I'd choose IDE, because of the price. If you want your SCSI disks to be faster (single disk access), you need to buy 7200rpm disks, which is probably not what you want at home (noise, heat). If you plan to put multiple disks (and maybe CD-Rom, ZIP, Scanner ...), than you might consider SCSI. SCSI disks disconnect form the bus after they received a command and reconnect to transmit the data later, which allows for good sharing of the bus between multiple disks. IDE does not allow other disks to transfer data, when one is busy. With DMA2/UDMA the high CPU load for transfering Data to/from IDE disks is no longer there. With UDMA, there is also some error checking for the transmission. (SCSI does this since many years.) Note that SCSI cables can be 3m (1.5m with Ultra SCSI) long, while IDE only 45cm. So if you you want to have a big tower, you IDE disks must be placed near the mainboard ...
So, IMHO, SCSI is the much better design, but you only profit in some cases as DMA2/UDMA has solved the CPU load problem for IDE. You have to check whether the SCSI advantages are worth the price for your application.
Just my E0.02 ... -- Kurt Garloff <K.Garloff@ping.de> (Dortmund, FRG) PGP key on http://student.physik.uni-dortmund.de/homepages/garloff
The second clause "open source code of derivative works" has been the most controversial (and, potentially the most successful) aspect of CopyLeft licensing. -- Halloween Document
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