>  SCSI drives are usually geared towards a different market, and the bus
> technology is faster in situations where you have lots of simultaneous i/o
> requests on a single bus but that dosen't mean that given faulty hardware
> it woulden't be corrupting data aswell.

>  As far as which IDE controllers work, I've had no problems with the BX
> chipsets controllers, or some older VIA's (I've heard the newer ones are
it depends what is "new" for you.

my pentium 225 with VIA MVP3 is quite usable but has slow IDE (12MB/s in
UDMA/33) and faulty ISA and PCI (there are many cards that don't work). 
new VIA products are even worse - looks like they prefer not tested and
done-for-yesterday projects just to be faster than competition (intel).
it is no problem when you have windoze which crashes more often because of
software problem.