15 Aug
2008
15 Aug
'08
11:42 a.m.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
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...
I'll give some additional reasons...
0. Most people never actually did backups and still don't.
1. SCSI supported daisy chaining with too many devices on one chain.
With two devices and one host on one cable there is less likelihood of
a problem than there is with with two devices and one host on two
chained cables with a terminator. And far less likelihood of a
problem than there is with 7 devices and one host on 7 cables and a
terminator. One incompatible or uncooperative device on the chain and
they all stop working.
2. DB-25 implementations of SCSI allowed the use of cheap printer
cables that really weren't up to the task of handling SCSI data rates.
3. Termination options could also be a pain... Terminator on the
device (meaning you need to open the box to see if it's terminated).
Autotermination (which sometimes put termination at the wrong spot in
the chain. Passive terminators. Active terminators. The Mac IIfx
special black terminator. SCSI printer interfaces that didn't even
have a second connector on them. And later when wide SCSI showed up,
narrow devices would only terminate half the lines.
4. For disks IDE was (and still is) half the price for the same
drive with a different controller.
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'm totally off tape. Our experience with DLT is that the drives
don't last, transfer rates are too slow, and the media are too
unreliable and too expensive. Haven't tried LTO Ultrium, but for
$1700 for a drive and $40 for a 400GB (uncompressed) tape it's too
expensive when you can get 750GB SATA drives for $150. (The crossover
point is 17TB).
Eric