12 Oct
2001
12 Oct
'01
2:52 p.m.
On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Jan Koller wrote:
Iggy Drougge wrote:
I think a better comparison would substitute ST-506 and ESDI for MFM
and RLL.
- don
Why? I've never had any need for a SCSI BIOS
on my SCSI computers.
The onboard bios' diagnostics, low level formatting, and media
verification, termination control, among other features, can be
rather convenient. And you don't have to worry about overwriting
the engineering track(s?) that some(all?) IDE has.
You don't have the master/slave issues or incompatibilities that
some IDE drives had
with SCSI, you can do more devices per controller port in
case, if for no other reason than, you want to.
I'd never stand up for IDE. I only use it out
of necessity, like
everyone else. But I'm not so sure that my next drive will be an
IDE. Not if I'm not getting a new IDE controller at the same time.
At the same time, even though drives for both
interfaces share more
and more parts, SCSI has only become more and more expensive, and
now it's not even an alternative for a lot of semi-professional
applications.
If you don't like SCSI? And you don't like IDE? And you don't like
expensive components? What are you going to use? only MFM and RLL? If you must have the latest SCSI interface technology,
yes, you
must "pay the man", but if you're willing to sacrifice a bit on
performance, and go one or two steps back on SCSI hardware technology,
there is nothing expensive about the parts. Plus, as it's
been up till now, the best, newest, most expensive IDE performance
level was only about par with that of whatever SCSI level was one
generation back.