On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 12:44:57PM -0400, Andrew Brown wrote:
> >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.
> 
> 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.

My only real comparison here is having recently switched my main 
'mail reading / everything else' machine from an SS10 with 4 and 18G
narrow scsi disks, to an Athlon 800 with 45G IBM IDE disks.  Both
machines are at NetBSD.

I find myself being frustrated at the inability for the Athlon with IDE
disks to function as an NFS server sufficiently enough to not have long
pauses in my mp3's or to have Netscape block for 5+ seconds at a time.
This could certainly be related to network issues even though 
there's only 3 machines on the network and the topology hasn't changed
since having switched over from the SS10.   The frequent and almost 
constant console messages about the NFS server not responding and then
coming back are fairly irritating as well.

While ssh'd into the IDE machine and interactively using 'nmh', I 
occasionally will type "next" only to discover I don't get the next
message right away, it just sits there, a second later I hit ^C to
try to see what's up but it's just blocked. Another second later, as
I'm about to wonder whether the machine just wedged on me, I get my
prompt back.  Do a 'ps -ax' and discover that the dailies are running
and chewing up the disk.  I never once experienced that on the SS10 with
narrow scsi disks...

So, maybe it's my configuration or something, but thus far, I'm not
exactly pleased with the concept of IDE.