Subject: Re: 1.4.2 Observations
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Thomas Michael Wanka <tm_wanka@earthling.net>
List: port-i386
Date: 03/27/2000 09:40:07
On 27 Mar 2000, at 17:13, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:

> For single disk configurations, modern IDE disks are supposed to be as
> good as scsi (I don't use IDE so don't quote me :-), and $/Mb is much
> better for IDE than scsi so its hard to suggest anyone go scsi for a
> single disk system.

Hi,

that statement needs to be cleared! It depends upon what one wants 
to do with the computer. As ide drives still need the processing 
power of the CPU to do transferrs there are many environments 
where SCSI is still more performant. Looking at these reviews will 
show, that ide disks have equal or higher ransferrates than SCSI 
disks, but most reviews do not consider CPU utilisation. From what I 
know ide drives do not come close to scsi drives for latency. 

So a general rule was that when the pc has a high CPU utilisation 
ide drives just dont get it. For the typical office environment ide 
hardware was just fine.

I do not know about the IDE RAID controllers from HPT and 
promise, but these could have overcome this problems by using an 
on board processor.

mike