Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 18:53:55 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, dscheidt@enteract.com, noslenj@swbell.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it? Message-ID: <199912141853.LAA19833@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19991213200556.0473c1e0@localhost> from "Brett Glass" at Dec 13, 99 08:33:45 pm
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> >I will let you in on a "secret": SCSI drives cost more because > >that's what the market will bear, based on their performance > >characteristics relative to IDE. > > Unfortunately, I don't believe that the price/performance > ratio of UltraSCSI is anywhere near that of Ultra-66 ATAPI. Who said anything about that? The market will bear higher prices from SCSI, so SCSI costs more. > >They cost the same to manufacture; it doesn't matter what mask > >you use to burn your 1 square inch ASIC. > > Which is the problem. You're being charged a premium for hardware > that's very similar, due to lower volume. And SCSI has higher command > latency than IDE. SCSI drives usually make up for this with tagged > command queueing, hidden elevator seeking, and larger on-drive > caches. Sometimes this is a clear win, but sometimes it is not. Sorry, but Bzzzt. SCSI is actually cheaper in Europe than the US. It is a function of market pressures. I can put you in contact with the IBM Santa Teresa (disk drive manufacturing) people if you need me to... > The ideal thing would be a hybrid: a drive which supported the > full SCSI command repertoire but didn't have the overhead of > selection, arbitration, bus settling time, signal deskewing, > etc. Yeah, that's called "ATAPI". All IDE CDROMs are SCSI CDROMS in disguise. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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