Western Digital Pulling Out Of SCSI HD Business

leiz writes "This article on Yahoo says Western Digital is pulling out of the enterprise hard drive business. This means they will no longer produce SCSI hard drives and Western Digital will be instead concentrating on the IDE and software business. What does this mean for the SCSI market? With 7200 rpm UltraATA/66 hard drives catching up in performance to SCSI HD, products such as the Fastrak RAID 0, 1, 0+1 card, and the cheap cost affectiveness of IDE/ATA, is SCSI no longer necessary for desktops / workstations / small servers?"

Comments

IDE benchs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found the IDE performance problems go away entirely with the correct bus-mastering settings. You still can't get decent performance with two drives on a single channel, but my new Abit motherboard came with four IDE channels. So you can have four IDE hard drives without losing performance.

Here are some real benchmarks to back this up:

[root@olympus /root]# /sbin/hdparm -c0 -d0 -k1 -m0 -W0 /dev/hda
<snip>
[root@olympus /root]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 28.40
seconds = 2.25 MB/sec
[root@olympus /root]# /sbin/hdparm -c1 -d1 -k1 -m16 -W1 /dev/hda
<snip>
[root@olympus /root]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.86
seconds =13.17 MB/sec

That's with a 7200 Seagate drive. The first benchmark, giving a whopping 2.25MB/sec, was with all the IDE options in sucky mode. This is the way older IDE controllers work, and in large part responsible for IDE's bad name. The second benchmark shows that it can have good performance. It's CPU performance wasn't as good as SCSI's (17% out of 200%; dual-processor box) but wasn't as bad as many have said.

Fibre Channel > SCSI > EIDE

[soldack]

EIDE will eventually hit limits as even desktop computers become more demanding. As that time arrives SCSI will take over. On the server front, fibre channel is looking like the future over SCSI. It may be even more expensive but it is faster, has a crazy 10 km or so distance limit, supports more devices on one loop, and supports multiple HBA's connected to one set of devices. This allows multiple systems to talk directly to the storage rather than through a network to a computer that talks to the storage. SANs are going to really need fibre channel.
SCSI may seem to be "too much" for the average user but in that as the old MTV logo used to say..."Too much is never enough!" This held true for music television and it holds true for computers. I remember getting time on a 386 SX 25 Mhz with 4MB RAM and 80 MB hard disk. This was a $10,000+ system at the time. Now it's a paper weight for all but a few geeks (like me) who love to find uses for old hardware. I have a few IDE paper weights...I will have a few more before they are done.