On Nov 28, Dave Sainty wrote
> Whilst I'm here...  In NZ, SCSI drives are incredibly expensive
> compared to IDE, and IDE performance seems to be really pretty good
> now, especially with Manuel's excellent and much appreciated work on
> NetBSD's IDE support (Thanks Manuel!).
> 
> Ignoring the annoying fact that PCI IDE cards seem awfully hard to
> come by (it's always on the motherboard now), is seems like I can get
> 4 cheap IDE drives into my machine on the existing motherboard
> support, RAID-5 them, and get a pretty good result for around half the
> price of a similar SCSI system.  Considering this is for a machine
> that rarely has anyone but me working on it, this seems like a
> sensible way to go.
> 
> Anyone got good or bad comments about using IDE drives for medium
> sized disk arrays?

Well, if you put 2 IDE devices on a channel, you'll have channel contention:
access to the devices have to be serialised (on a SCSI bus you can issue
one command per disk at the same time, using SCSI disconnect/reselect feature).
So I guess you'll still have lower performances than with SCSI, even
with equivalent drives.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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