Quote:>: If you check the prices, you'll find that the price penalty for using
>: SCSI, given OTHERWISE IDENTICAL DRIVES, is quite small -- usually $20-$60
> there are few drives like this. the only one I've noticed recently
> is the Quantum Fireball. at the moment, I see only 3.2G for $220 or $315,
> not a trivial difference.
Granted, there are fewer and fewer drives available in both SCSI and EIDE
varieties. I wasn't trying to claim there are tons of them. As to the
price difference when they do exist, $95 was on the extreme end the last
time I went drive shopping. A quick check at MegaHaus shows differences
that are higher (and they were higher the last time I shopped than the
time before that, so the difference is creeping up).
Quote:>: 1) If you're on a shoestring budget, you CAN get cheaper EIDE drives,
>: but they'll also not perform as well as the cheapest SCSI drives. You
>: get what you pay for.
> this is only marginally true. big/new eide disks deliver up to 11 MB/s.
> yes, that's lower than the 15 or so that a Cheetah does, and even mundane
> 7200 rpm scsi's are a little faster than the top eides. the price difference
> is 200% or better, though!
I keep hearing people quote these phenomenal transfer rates, but I've yet
to see it myself, on ANY system. Maybe I've just been seeing bum drives,
but the ones I've personally laid eyes on still max out at no better than
about 6MB/s, ON AVERAGE. They'll do better than that on their best
tracks, of course, but worse on their worst tracks. My sample does not
include the really high-end SCSI stuff; it's mostly mid-range to high-end
EIDE and low-end SCSI.
Your reply implies that price is or should be linearly dependant upon
speed -- that a drive that's twice as fast is worth precisely twice as
much money. This is a subjective matter, though, and has to be determined
by the priorities of the individual making the purchase. For some people,
price is far more important, while for others it's performance.
Quote:> in short, get SCSI if you're going to get >2 disks, other scsi devices
> or must have Cheetahs. otherwise, you'll save LOTS of money by buying
> good (big/new) eide's and using the busmastering controller built in to
> your motherboard.
One of the reasons I like SCSI is that I, and I suspect most people who
use the same computer and upgrade it rather than junk it and buy a new
one, end up with multiple drives whether they intend it or not.
Therefore, somebody who buys a computer now with one drive may not get
much benefit from going SCSI, but in six months or a year, when it comes
time to upgrade the hard drive, the investment in SCSI WILL pay off. It
may even pay off monetarily. For instance, if somebody buys a computer
with a hard drive, CD-ROM, and internal Zip disk all on EIDE, and then
does the Right Thing and buys a tape backup (on EIDE, for the sake of
argument), then the only ways to upgrade the hard disk would be to replace
it or to buy an extra controller (which will difficult or possibly
impossible to configure, depending on other components). With SCSI, those
five components can exist on a single chain, which can end up saving
money, or at least reducing the cost of the initial SCSI investment.
--
Rod Smith Author of:
http://php.indiana.edu/~rodsmith "OS/2 Soundcard Summary"
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