*BSD News Article 42447


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From: rsmith@psych.colorado.edu (Roderick Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.os2.misc
Subject: Re: IDE bad? was Re: List of recommended hardware components
Date: 13 Feb 1995 16:50:25 GMT
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
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Vijay Narayan Ramasubramanian (vnr0001@jove.acs.unt.edu) wrote:
: SCSI proponents claim...NOT TO MENTION that a SCSI setup was 
: EXPENSIVE...now with EIDE, performance has almost doubled for the 
: price...true, IDE will bever truly be as fast as SCSI, but even in 
: multitasking OSes like OS/2, EIDE holds its own...those who want SCSI 
: performance, as always, will spring for the extra cost (and you cannot deny 
: that a SCSI setup worth having costs more)...

Not necessarily by much, especially for people with PCI bus computers.  
Excellent SCSI controller cards based on the NCR 53c810 controller chip 
can be had for as little as $70, and many PCI motherboards include this 
chip for little or no extra cost compared to similar boards without it.  
SCSI hard drives cost anywhere from $0 to $50 more than equivalent IDE 
drives, so the net increase to get a SCSI-based PCI system can be pretty 
darned small, perhaps even nonexistant.

There are also advantages to SCSI other than raw speed, such as the 
ability to connect up to seven devices to a single controller and the 
availability of SCSI devices (tapes, scanners, etc.) that aren't 
available, or at least which aren't as common, in EIDE form.  (Although 
most of these do also come with proprietary or other types of interfaces, 
that chews up another slot or some port or whatnot.)

--
					--Rod Smith
					  RSMITH@PSYCH.COLORADO.EDU