Never ceases to surprise me how much spirited debate the SCSI vs IDE issue always seems to generate. I have first-hand experience with both, and subscribe to the *hybrid* model - a single, small SCSI drive for the OS, apps & swap/page file, and multiple, monster IDE drives for cheap mass storage .. taking advantage of the best of both worlds.
SCSI's primary advantages are two-fold:
1. Multitasking. (IDE is a single-tasking interface)
2. Blazing fast seek/access times .. the most important factor in disk-based system performance ..
.. as low as 3.9/5.9ms, compared to 8.5/12.7 for the fastest IDE drives. Storagereview talks about the importance of access times on system perf
HERE, where they say this:
STR had relatively little effect upon overall drive performance. Today, it should be clear that steadily-increasing transfer rates have in effect "written themselves out" of the performance equation ... it should be clear that random access time is vastly more important than sequential transfer rate when it comes to typical disk performance. Thus, the reordered "hierarchy" of important quantifiable specs would read:
1. Seek Time
2. Spindle Speed
3. Buffer Size
4. Data Density
and also
HERE, where they say this:
"...it's evident that random access dominates typical workstation usage ... Though the loading of executables, DLLs, and other libraries are at first a sequential process, subsequent accesses are random in nature. Though the files themselves might be relatively large, parts of them are constantly being sent to and retrieved from the swapfile. Swapfile accesses, terribly fragmented in nature, are quite random. Executables call other necessary files such as images, sounds, etc. These files, though they may represent large sequential accesses, consist of a very small percentage of access when compared to the constant swapping that occurs with most system files. Combined with the natural fragmentation that plagues the disks of all but the most dedicated defragmenters, these factors clearly indicate that erring on the side of randomness would be preferred." End paste.
A 3rd advantage is that SCSI drives are also more *reliable*, with longer MTBF specs and warrantees, which is a big factor for me. I've never had a SCSI drive die, and only one IDE drive, and that was a laptop drive, after I dropped the thing a few times.
The good thing is that you don't need very much space to run an OS, apps & swap/page file .. even if you dual-boot. 9GBs is more than enough to run both W2K, WinME, and even a distro or two of Linux. A 10Krpm 9GB drive can be had for as little as $209
here. (Free shipping with
THIS deal)
.. prolly less if you shop around. Less than the price of many gfx cards, and the drive will certainly last longer than any gfx card purchased today. Longevity adds to value. Only with SCSI can you get performance that looks anything like
this.
For me, SCSI had great 'Wow' factor. Upgrading to 10Krpm LVD SCSI from 7200rpm IDE was similar to upgrading to a cable modem from dial-up & to my first-ever 3D gfx accelerator (V2) were the only other things that made me say, "Wow." Anybody recall how much better online gaming was after upgrading to a cable modem? That's similar to how it is upgrading to a SCSI boot drive.
But SCSI definitely isn't for everyone. If all you do is play games, email & surf the web, you're wasting your money on SCSI. And it can be challenging for some to set up a SCSI subsystem. Certainly not for the novice.
The SCSI vs IDE debate has raged at the Storagereview for years. The 100+ post mother-of-all SCSI vs IDE threads is
HERE .. for those who wanna look at the question a little more closely.
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