>> > Old stories/myths. Five years ago (the last time I dealt with SCSI in 
>> > Unix), the story was "SCSI is faster and more reliable than IDE". I 
>> > know the "faster" part has gone away, but I don't know about the 
>> it IS faster asd it can take more than one request at once and then
>> allowing disk firmare to perform them in optimal sequence.
>
>It is, in fact, no longer any faster.  Ultra-3 SCSI was an attempt to
>pull ahead of ATA again in raw interface speed, which was readily
>trumped by ATA-100.  In practice, both interfaces are now faster than
>any HDA being manufactured, and the interface speed is just kind of
>silly.

they all seem plenty fast to me at this point...which only means i
don't often run up against a situation where i'm waiting impatiently
for my disks to do something.

ide disks are certainly, at this point (a) fast, (b) big, and (c)
cheap.

on the other hand, scsi seems still to be the least common denominator
between all systems.  my case in point was my zip drive.  the original
parallel port interface would have been nasty and physically not
possible on all my machines.  next are usb and ide, again not
physically possibly on most of my machines.  scsi, on the other hand,
is everywhere.  and it works.

if you just need a big cheap disk, ide should be fine.  if you want to
be able to hook up more than two or three, or you envision other
components coming along, scsi is a much better direction to go in.

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