Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 13:17:00 -0700 From: Leonard Chung <leonard@ssl.berkeley.edu> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> Cc: kline@tao.thought.org, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bad IDE Drive Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20001010124858.026637c0@yikes.com> In-Reply-To: <200010100509.XAA18135@harmony.village.org> References: <Your message of "Mon, 09 Oct 2000 19:06:31 PDT." <4.3.2.7.2.20001009190324.028c6d58@yikes.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20001009190324.028c6d58@yikes.com>
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Yes, I'm aware of the differing RPMs. SCSI drives actually now are up to 15,000RPM to it shouldn't be long before IDE is up to 10KRPM. The differing RPMs is more of a marketing decision than any inherent limitation in IDE itself. SCSI is a premium product, so it gets the higher RPMs first and sometimes bigger buffers, but again, this is due not to the SCSI bus having higher performance. Where the focus is on spindle speed for SCSI, the focus for IDE is on areal density. IDE drives actually give better performance for the dollar in MAPS (megabyte accesses per second), KAPS (kilobyte accesses/s), and much better performance in sequential performance (i.e. all round) and for that price, you get the benefit of redundancy. So with IDE you get better performance and less cost. However, for the 5400 and 7200RPM drives, for almost all manufacturers, irregardless of the interface, the actual drive mechanism is the same. Drive manufacturers are all losing big $$$. Using common components across all of their product lines saves money. Since the moving parts are the most common reason for failure rather than the solid state interface, the reliability on modern IDE and SCSI hard drives is generally the same. For SCSI hard drives that run at higher RPM (hotter and generally considered to be more "fragile" and sensitive to environment), I'd be very surprised to hear that a new 5400RPM drive, whether SCSI or IDE, is much less reliable than a new 10,000RPM drive. One other consideration to remember is that of the environment in which a drive is functioning -- most SCSI drives are owned by people or organizations with sufficient technical expertise (not to mention money) to know proper care and feeding of HDs and computers, while IDE drives' (especially low end ones) owners have a much higher "bozo" factor. Leonard At 10:09 PM 10/9/2000, Warner Losh wrote: >In message <4.3.2.7.2.20001009190324.028c6d58@yikes.com> Leonard Chung writes: >: Almost all modern IDE and SCSI drives use the same drive mechanism between >: them, so their reliability is the same. > >I've had way more problems with IDE drives going south than SCSI. >Most of the IDE drives still are 5400rpm, while most scsi drives run >at 7200 or 10000. The low end of scsi is higher than the low end of >IDE. The low end of IDE redefines junk. > >Warner -- Leonard Chung - <leonard@ssl.berkeley.edu> SETI@home - The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence @ home http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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