re ide vs scsi in article qk kvinnndk dns nmsu edu bgrubb dante nmsu edu grubb writes point of view why does scsi have an advantage when it comes to multi tasking data is data and it could be anywhere on the drive can scsi find it faster can it get it off the drive and into the computer faster does it have a better cache system i thought scsi was good at managing a data bus when multiple devices are attached if we are only talking about a single drive explain why scsi is inherently faster at managing data from a hard drive ide integrated device electronics currently the most common standard and is mainly used for medium sized drives can have more than one hard drive asynchronous transfer mb s max why don t you start with the spec sheet of the isa bus first you can quote scsi specs till you re blue in the face but if they exceed the isa bus capability then what s the point who says ide is limited to megs sec what about vlb ide does anyone know how they perform so at its lowest setting scsi interface in asynchronous scsi mode averages the through put maximum of ide in asynchronous mode in full scsi mode it blows poor ide out the window down the street and into the garbage can as implimented on what system the problem becomes can the drive mechanisim keep up with those through put rates and that is where the bottleneck and cost of scsi comes from not the interface itself but more and more from drive mechanisims to use the scsi through put given the original question scsi used only as a single hard drive controller is it then necessary to get a scsi drive that will do at least maybe megs sec for the scsi choice to make any sence what does a meg megs sec scsi drive cost the cost of scsi interface is a self fulliling prophisy few people buy scsi because it is so expencive for the pc which in turn convices makes that mass producing scsi which would reduce its cost is unwarented and so scsi is expencive that is the effect of the rule of scale the more items sold the less each item has to bare the brunt the cost of manufacture and so the less each item has to cost the original cga cart back in was i think the original ega card or pga was scsi has stood relatively alone in not coming down in price mainly because we re talking about pc s and not sun s or sparc or sgi or name your favorite unix workstation that is after millions of pc buying decisions over the years scsi has had plenty of time to come down in price i won t argue that the scsi standard makes for a good well implimented data highway but i still want to know why it intrinsically better than ide on an isa bus when it comes to multi tasking os s when managing data from a single scsi hard drive
