SCSI Hard Drives vs. EIDE Hard Drives

[tyronemoss]

hey everybody. just wanted to know what the difference between SCSI and EIDE harddrives..
is it worth the extra hundred something?

[BuddhaTB]

hey everybody. just wanted to know what the difference between SCSI and EIDE harddrives..
is it worth the extra hundred something?

The only real difference is the interface and the speed. SCSI drives are supposed to be faster. But some of the newer EIDE hard drives with the 8Mb Buffer offer similar performance to the SCSI drives. Instead of paying the extra for the SCSI drives, just go for a Maxtor or Western Digital EIDE hard drive with the 8MB Buffer. They also come with a 3 year warranty unlike the regular EIDE hard drives without the 8MB buffer.

[tyronemoss]

same deal with cd burners?

[TheWizard]

I think SCSI CD burners exist only for machines that have a SCSI interface. What I mean is, some machines are built with only a SCSI interface, and thus it's a lot easier for the administrator of that machine to buy a SCSI burner rather than buy an IDE interface and an IDE burner. I don't think SCSI CD burners have anything major over IDE burners. Although, I could be wrong.

[anyhow]

SCSI hard drives can be quite a bit faster than IDE, since 10,000rpm and 15krpm drives have been available for a while compared to the 7200rpm of IDE drives.
Not to mention the fact you can have many more drives attached to your SCSI controller card than you can with the usual IDE cards.

I don't think I've come across many/any computers that didn't have any onboard IDE ports for a long time and even servers I've owned that came with SCSI hard drives, DAT and CD had onboard IDE, which was often used for a second CD rom.

[Action Jackson]

Having never owned a SCSI device I cannot speak from any experience.

But I believe the most important difference was that SCSI device enables the computer to be used for other things simultaneously with little or no interruption to the device.

IDE devices requires more resources and there is a risk that performing other functions in the background may cause interruptions to the device.

This is only a general and unsubstantiated statement.

[Matt]

For any of you who have used a 7200rpm whatevermodel ide hard drive vs a 10k or 15k lvd scsi on a u2w80 or u160 interface you can feel the difference in access times and the cpu utilization. This is especially useful since the scsi interface generally blows IDE out of the water when it comes to Multi-IO like heavy duty web servers, database servers, etc.

However these situations mostly occur in servers, not desktops so the price/performance difference is usually favorable towards IDE.

[tyronemoss]

is there something IDE can do better than scsi??

[cfitz]

Keep your wallet full...

cfitz

[tyronemoss]

geez I know. 1,000 dollars for won. I hope I win the lottery

[UALOneKPlus]

Some new IDE drives, such as the IBM Deskstar drives, have something called "tag and seek", which allows much faster access times than regular 7200 RPM drive. However, this requires a specialized Pacific Digital controller card - DiscStaQ.

[Wayne]

IDE are "one thing at a time" systems.

SCSI lets you do real multitasking. You can't run a decent server without SCSI.

I had a SCSI 3 PIII system before this one and although my new PIV system is much faster when it comes to doing two or three things at the same time it just bogs down.