no I don't own one, BUT I've used one.. ohhh HELL YA!
here's the whole situation in my eyes when it comes to IDE vs SCSI:
SCSI, is what Windows was designed for, of vice versa. you have hundreds of .dll files making up your OS (whether Windows 2K, or even Windows 9x, even Linux has .dll equivalents). do you think it requires high transfer rates to get all those tiny .dll files dancing? no, by the time your drive gets ahold of the .dll file, it's pretty much completed transferring (ok, not necessarily THAT fast, but close to that), and [/b]then[/b] is when your drives seek time comes in. your computer has to then find the NEXT .dll file to read.
THAT is what the majority of IDE drives are poor at. Windows. plain and simple.
SCSI drives have insanely low access times, becuase they each have a really thin platters. think of it this way, any normal CD has a pretty wide area to scan across right? well if you want to decrease the average seek time, you must either increase the head speed, or decrease the length the head has to travel to get anywhere on the disk. SCSI of course has the best read head speed available, and to improve upon that, they also make the platter thinner. thinner in that the more central area of the platter that might normally have data, is now data-less. thereby leaving an outer rim of useable platter, which is thinner then what it would be normally on, say, an IDE drive.
ok now that I've explained why disk access speed is important, and how they achieve it, I'll explain a few other things..
SCSI of course gives you almost fully CPU independant use. that means its VERY good at disk intensive operations, because it
doesn't slow the computer down when it comes to crunch time. so you can expect better abilities to do things while burning CD's, or while loading large programs, etc.
SCSI also solves some problems when it comes to pure transfer rate (should u need it), by having insane RPM rates.. of course, that also increases noise, and heat, trivial things that should be easily solved if you have the money to spend on SCSI.
SCSI also of course has the ability to run many more devices on a single controller, without having to worry about losing performance (until you hit the bandwidth max, but there's no having to switch between drive to drive with IDE giving you HORRIBLE performance). this allows for much
higher flexibility, and better upgradeability.
and finally, having an All SCSI system, allows you to free up IRQ's taken by the IDE channels. of course u NFS4 don't seem to worry about that, becuase u have Win2K.
disadvantages of SCSI are as follows:
-expensive
-even MORE expensive if you want a lot of SCSI storage
-trivial things such as heat, and noise (I personally barely care about it
)
you CAN solve many of the problems when it comes to storage space on SCSI by using your CDBurner effectively (for your MP3's, Videos, etc), or by having an IDE drive (I'm thinking one of those 80 giggers..) for things that don't require too much speed.
now you CAN just transfer over to SCSI slowly instead of going for a one shot deal.. buying a SCSI card, and SCSI CD hard drive would be my first move, however for you, it appears a CD burner might be better (reducing the amount of IDE devices faster). then you eventually bring it down to your SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD burner, possibly SCSI DVD ROM, and finally your Mass media IDE drive, or something similar.
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