Quoting Jukka Marin (jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi):
> On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 07:49:15PM -0600, Rick Kelly wrote:
> > Greywolf said:
> > >SCSI's additional components do not justify THAT much of a price
> > >difference.  They charge that much more because They Can [TM].
> 
> Yeah, a 100+ GB SCSI drive costs 10 times as much as a similar IDE drive.
> 
> > But SCSI drives usually last longer, and you can actually have multiple
> > drives on a controller.
> 
> My SCSI and IDE drives both seem to die before long.  Well, some drives
> last 5 years even, but some SCSI drives have a feature of dying at the
> age of 12-18 months.
> 
> I wish there was one manufacturer who put reliability before price and
> top performance..

And yet you just complained about price above...

I'm booting from a 535 SCSI drive that I've had since 1994.
It's been in regular use for 8 years.  It's there cause I
prefer a smaller disk for the OS and separate OS from non-OS
and data.  It sort of irks me to boot from a 60GB as I am now
on a newish machine.

I also have a Barracuda or two around that are from 95/96.
The low end disks on sale a Joe's computer shack are often
the runts of the litter.  My largest drive, for a while,
was regurgitated from a high end file server (we upgraded
drives and had a stack of now "tiny" 18GB disks).  I expect
it to never die.


Fans are loud.  They also make things live longer.  The new
PC box has 5 plus 3 little HD Bay fans.

Bad power supplies suck.  If it came with your cheapo case,
hurl it at the annoying kid next door and get a good one.

OTOH, I have an ISP quality UPS and power draws like monitors
and printers go through a line isolater.  The osilliscope I
used to have near my workspace was watching wall current when
not in use just for amusement.  NYC power scared me enough to
keep a step away from it.


Portable drives will have a shorter lifetime that one seated in
a nice cool clean computer with good power and lots of air.
Plan that it will die.  rsync is your friend.