Date: Sat, 01 Nov 1997 06:25:43 -0600 From: dkelly@hiwaay.net To: hcremean@vt.edu Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IDE Drive Economy Message-ID: <199711011225.GAA13591@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Lee Cremeans <lee@wakky.dyn.ml.org> of "Sat, 01 Nov 1997 04:18:44 EST." <19971101041844.31170@wakky.dyn.ml.org>
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lee@wakky.dyn.ml.org said: > FWIW, the only real difference between a SCSI drive and an IDE drive > these days is the interface chip and the firmware. Well, I think the manufacturers of SCSI drives know a SCSI drive is going into a more demanding system than a consumer IDE drive. I note that 5400 RPM, 128k of RAM, and about 6GB are the upper limits on IDE drives these days. 7200 RPM, 1MB, Fast-Wide SCSI, 9G, 3.5" drives are on the liquidation block at http://www.onsale.com. Certainly some models have the same disks, heads, actuators, for both IDE and SCSI versions. I haven't seen any SCSI/IDE twins that were not on the low end of the market. > It is unlikely that home users will just suddenly start buying > mass quantities of scsi interface drives, so they will probably > continue to be inproportionately expensive. There is hope. Symbios is doing an excellent job producing inexpensive high performance SCSI controllers. Some users will balk at an additional cost for a SCSI drive, but absolutely refuse to buy once they notice they need a controller too. > Well, the Mac did help with that somewhat. I noticed that when Apple > started running aground, the prices of SCSI stuff went way up (higher > than what they had been). Apple cheated in some newer Macs, tho, and > used IDE; I forget which ones exactly. In the last year or so when SCSI stuff skyrocketed was the same time SCSI RPM's started increasing and onboard memory increased. Was also about the same time many Mac mailorder HD houses started carrying Mac clones. This week's ad in MacWeek was the first for APS that I've seen in a long time that featured their HD's. Recently they featured their Motorola PowerPC clones. But this time the clones had only a small mention, and 2G SCSI HD's got top billing at about $229. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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