[**WARNING** This is starting to drift off-topic from Linux-Audio ] Yes, in cost per GB, nothing beats IDE. But for most sizes of drives, the extra cost of SCSI isn't that bad. I've paid $90 for the last few 36GB drives, which is quite reasonable really considering it's a 10,000 RPM drive with a large cache and a good warranty. One thing I seem to notice is that many SCSI drives don't seem to use the full platter in order to keep the heads over the "dense" zones of the media. When I examine the transfer rate curves of my Fujitsu MAS 10K RPM drives, for example, the difference between inner and outer edge throughput isn't anywhere near as great as the difference in performance between the inner+outer edges of my WD 200GB drive, for example. For another thing... I know I can't prove this scientifically, but I have ALOT of samples from different manufacturers and time periods over the past 15 years. My SCSI drives last a very long time, and when they've finally kicked the bucket (rarely after less than 6 years), I've had ample warning [LOG SENSE notifications of soft-retry counts, etc]. In contrast, my IDE drives have failed abruptly and without warning, many times before the warranty was expired. I have a bucket of such drives, which I intend to take the platters out to make attractive and very smooth drinks coasters. The IDE bucket has drives from Seagate, Quantum (the most common being the Fireballs, an apt name if I ever heard one), and Maxtor. Oddly, I have yet to throw a dead Western Digital drive into the Drive Bucket of Doom - but that could be because I had a bias against the brand for a long time. But I do have many running WDs in current systems as they tend to be the fastest drives available for IDE. I remain offended that they are the only IDE drive manufacturer which doesn't include a thermal sensor in their drives. I have functioning SCSI drives in several machines from Seagate, Quantum [dating back to the 1.6" 400MB PD-series, circa 1992 as well as a hot-running Grand Prix Wide-Differential 4GB drive circa 1996], IBM, and DEC [pre-Quantum acquisition]. This latter drive is a VERY BUSY Squid Proxy Cache drive in my home network server [same one which does the audio logging from the MERLIN phone system]. The last SCSI disk failure I had was a DEC 1GB drive (ca. 1993-94 manufacture), which began getting very slow and kicking up LOG SENSE alerts [I use a hard disk driver I wrote myself for the Macintosh in this instance]. It continued to function well enough to make a complete backup of all of the files, and for another 2 weeks before finally expiring. The drive was 6-7 years old at the time of death. My bucket of dead ATA CD-ROM drives got so large, I surrendered it to a landfill. As contrast, I've only retired two SCSI CD-ROM drives, and one was a cheap Ricoh CD-R burner which I never trusted when it was brand new. As an old SCSI hacker + wardog, yes, I'll admit some bias against IDE. But I've given IDE alot of runtime as well as my SCSI stuff, and IDE continually disappoints me, while SCSI just keeps on working. I know the bare drives are mostly the same and the differences are in the controller on the underside. I note that most SCSI drive warranties (3-5 years) are longer than IDE (which is now 1 year for most drives/models). Perhaps the extra cost of SCSI (aside from the smaller capacity production lines for the models) is due to better testing/more conservative designs, or what have you. I wish I could really know for certain. Really? That's a bit surprising. Those use hard disks? Fascinating. I'd have thought the environments were too harsh. Your work sounds interesting, though, Jan. Ouch. That's amazing. UGH, SATA, at least in this first generation, is a mess. I've been following some of the T13 standards discussions about it, and things don't look very pretty there. All I can suggest is that you validate specific drives to controller chipsets for the time being, and watch your cabling lengths despite marketing b.s. which claims it can be "very long". Do not violate the "grounding rules", and don't run SATA cables outside of reasonably shielded environments if they have a great deal of radio emissions. There are some publicly-accessible discussions of these issues, so this isn't just FUD. See <http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm> -- the author, Hale Landis, is an involved member of the NCITS T13 [formerly X3T13] committee, and has contributed a significant body of work to the ATA standards over the years. =MB= -- A focus on Quality.

Malcolm Baldridge wrote: Those platters also make fine wind chimes, although it's better to use several drives of different sizes as all those precisely machined platters from the same drive play exactly the same note. ;-) "Everything has at least two uses: One for which it was made... And one for which it was... ...not." ~Jos~

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 15:42:52 -0700 Malcolm Baldridge &lt;linux-audio(a)paypc.com&gt; wrote: I think that I've now actively avoided each major manufacturer three times each now. It's not so much that the company itself lacks the resources or desire to do this correctly, but sometimes the design or manufacturing process just doesn't scale to the big time. Anyone else remember the stiction problem in the Seagate 105MB drives? (Don't laugh, that was a lot of space at the time.) The grease would cool and congeal around the spindle when the drive was turned off. When it was turned on after being off for a while, there was sometimes a hair less torque than what was required to break the seal and start the platters spinning. I'd fix these my hitting the drive enclosure gently with a rubber mallet just as I was switching the power on. I loved doing that at work. And people used to say that SCSI was voodoo. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

Our local 'white box' PC builder is now advising against SATA drives because the little connectors keep falling off in transit (just the journey by courier from workshop to customer). They don't really wnt to glue them in... Cheers Daniel