On Jan 10, John Nemeth wrote
> [...]
> 
>      Personally, I think IDE et al is crap.  Too little, too late.
> Although, they have managed to match SCSI for raw transfer speed, they
> miss everything else that helps throughput (disconnect, command
> queueing, busmastering, etc.).

There is disconnect and command queueing in the newest IDE devices.
For a desktop, IDE is as good as SCSI for performances (you almost never
use all the IDE devices at the same time, and you can arrange to spread
the 2 most used devices accross the 2 busses).
But IDE is still behind SCSI for reliability: the electrical specification
of IDE are a hack (the IDE bus is not properly terminated !) so, under some
conditions you can expect occasionnal transfert failures. 

I would not recommend IDE for important data storages (and my /home,
both at work and at home are SCSI :) or backup systems but for a system disk
on a desktop, or rarely used devices such as CD drives it is OK.

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