From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Sep 17 10:59:42 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA20983 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 17 Sep 1995 10:59:42 -0700 Received: from who.cdrom.com (who.cdrom.com [192.216.222.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA20959 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 1995 10:59:39 -0700 Received: from fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu (Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.34]) by who.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.11) with ESMTP id HAA21456 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 1995 07:49:13 -0700 Received: (from jfieber@localhost) by fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu (8.6.11/8.6.9) id JAA10375; Sun, 17 Sep 1995 09:49:17 -0500 Date: Sun, 17 Sep 1995 09:49:17 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: Didier Derny cc: jdl@chromatic.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: atapi.c and wcd.c missing.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 16 Sep 1995, Didier Derny wrote: > I can't see any reason why the SCSI controller and devices are so expensive. Marketing. If you look around, the devices are pretty competitive, thanks to Apple for creating a mass market, but the PC SCSI controllers are outrageous. I think it is because the billions of PC users have it in their head that SCSI == server hardware == expensive and that is the end. They never think a little further and ask "Does it really have to be that expensive?". They never looked in an Amiga magazine and discovered that a decent controller can be had for around US$70. I *know* it isn't the fact that relative to IDE, SCSI controllers don't have a big enough market to be low-cost. I wouldn't be surprised if Adaptec sells more SCSI controllers in a month than most 3rd party SCSI manufactures for the Amiga sold in their lifetime. And for the devices, SCSI devices are a much better investment because they are platform independent. For example, one of my (recently deceased) hard drives started life in an HP 720, lived in an Amiga for a couple years and then in a PC for a couple years. My tape drive has a similar story, although I don't know where it started life. Had I used some platform specific specific device devices, I would have had to ditch a tape drive and 3 hard drives when I switched platforms a couple years ago (amiga->pc). That would have far more expensive than an outrageously priced PC SCSI controller, never mind a reasonably priced one. Buy SCSI. You won't regret it. Low end Macintosh and Amigas use SCSI, why not low end PC clowns? Just say NO to IDE! -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ============