SCSI -> SATA

[Oliver]

These days, I think it's often true that ATA and SCSI drives are very similar internally.  Some manufacturers have stated this fact, when producing two different interfaces for the same drive.  I'm not sure what the current state of the technology is these days, but previously SCSI had a strong advantage in managing multiple storage devices simultaneously.  Previously SCSI devices often had superior mechanical design/testing, and better predictive logic for multiple task management, seeking, and overall throughput.  Since IDE has been using better DMA systems, and high speed serial transfer has come a long way in the past several years, I'm not sure how much of a difference there is any more.  At least if one is using a single drive, I don't think there is much (any?) advantage in using SCSI.  That wasn't really true 10 to 15 years ago, but IDE has definitely improved a lot.  I have read that high priced SCSI drives are designed/tested to have much greater longevity and reliability for critical server applications, but who knows?

Is anyone here involved in storage design?

-Oli

[Oliver]

nope, SCSI hardrives is not mechanicaly identical to ata/sata drives... a scsi drive is always of a far higher and better quality than any ATA/SATA/SATA2 drives...

Hmm, I remember previously talking to a hard drive company rep about this (maybe Quantum, but can't remember clearly).  He told me that for the drive model I was considering, they manufactured two versions of the drive, but the mechanics were the same.  He could have been wrong though.  Can't remember what his job title was.

[Oliver]

justthatgood wrote:
...Really I think they suck.  So far on my PC I've had them on a Promise Fasttrak S150 4 port RAID, and they ran like dogs...

In what way did they run like dogs?  Were they slow, or did they have frequent errors?

-Oli