[H-GEN] Careful, the hard disk might hear you.

[David Seikel]

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 --- Joe Skilton <shnads at 3blokes.mine.nu> wrote: 
>         Have you Looked into Serial ATA?, They are reasonably cheap(the
> drives) and a majority of new motherboards are supporting it now, you may
> find it's more beneficial to you than SCSI will be.

Since you asked...

First of all, I intend to keep my current motherboard for at least two
years, and it has no support for Serial ATA.  Not really a big problem, but
you did mention it.

The main objection I have to Serial ATA is that it still uses ATA HDs,
which are not as reliable or as fast as SCSI.  Serial ATA currently does
150 MB/s with a maximum spin speed of 10,000 RPM, while SCSI currently does
320 MB/s with spin speeds of 10,000 - 15,000 RPM.  As I found out with my
ATA133 HD, there is not much point having the high bandwidth if the disk
can't deliver the data fast enough to fill it, that is where higher spin
rates come into play.  The faster the bits move under the read head, the
faster they will come out of the drive.

The MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures, a measure of reliability) for ATA is
about half that of SCSI.  I suspect that this is directly related to the
fact that ATA is a consumer device (mass market, cheap, but dodgy) while
SCSI has been left to the more professional market (expensive, but better
build quality, if you don't get more bang per buck, why pay the high
prices).

When Serial ATA version III comes out in a few years time, they will
deliver 600 MB/s, but still have the same maximum spin rate.  SCSI is also
a moving target, and I expect that it will still be quicker by then.


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