14 Aug
2008
14 Aug
'08
12:12 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 14 Aug 2008 at 12:36, Jules Richardson wrote:
For sure - but SCSI seemed to have a reputation for being picky about cabling,
host adapter settings, device ordering etc. - all the exact same things which
have plagued IDE over the years. Given that IDE was more accessible due to it
being cheaper technology, I'm surprised that it too didn't gain a reputation
for requiring goat sacrifices and the like that SCSI did. I suppose cost wins
out over common sense at times...
Funny how SCSI seemed to get a bad name for that
kind of thing, yet
IDE's reputation stood intact despite all the inconsistencies.
One of the answers that I wanted to convey to the OP was "If you want
to (fairly) painlessly increase hard disk storage on an older system,
get a SCSI controller and drive." But ISA SCSI controllers are
getting harder to find, so that's probably a no-go.
IDE is cheap in comparison to SCSI, so that was probably one very
good reason why it found wide adoption. If disks were bad, tapes were far worse. There was
all manner of
mutually-incompatible cheap tape backup out there. We insisted as
SCSI being the only tape interface that we would support--there was
an ANSI-defined common command set and most of the later units were
read-after-write verification.
Yep - there was an awful lot of proprietary stuff out there. Personally I'm a
DLT fan - like you say, it's expensive, but it's worth it for the reliability.
I used to really like DAT (mainly for compactness) until I started seeing tape
and drive reliability problems all over the place.
cheers
Jules