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Serial ATA vs. SCSI - Will it Compete?
fazzumar asks: "I've been checking out serial ATA (SATA) and it seems like it's got a lot of potential. The first generation spec was finalized August 2001 and members of the SATA group anticipate a 12-18 month acceptance period. They've planned for a cut-over phase and adapters that allow connecting SATA devices to ATA adapters and vice versa. The cables alone are a worthwhile advantage (4 pins, up to 1 meter in length), and the 150MB/sec bandwidth is a (minor) improvement over current ATA drives & adapters. Infoworld has a story on SATA that provides a few tidbits of information. What I really want to know is, will manufacturers of the new host adapters be able to integrate many of the advantages that SCSI provides or will the cost of adding these features push the retail cost too high for the anticipated market?" I just picked up a new WD Hard drive just yesterday for the planned MP3 jukebox I hope to be building near the end of the summer. I really wanted to go SCSI, but couldn't. While the poster claims a near ~7x in price difference, I saw about a ~5x difference in my local store. Is SCSI in danger of falling behind IDE drives (especially serial IDE drives) in popularity?
"I love SCSI, and I can bring myself to accept the additional cost of the controller, but with IDE hard drive prices dropping, I frequently wonder if SCSI drive prices are artificially inflated. Just a few years ago, SCSI drives were ~10-20% more than IDE and now they're ~7X more than an IDE drive. (Seagate 10k RPM SCSI - ~18 gig for ~175. Western Digital 7200 RPM IDE - ~120 gig for ~175) If the option comes out to get SCSI performance from an IDE drive I'm going to take it."
That's one hell of a rejoinder to a throw-away comment.
More specifically: there are much larger margins on server-targeted hardware, such as tape drives, than there is in the desktop arena. While 5-10% margins are common at the retail level for consumer hardware, tape systems seem to start at 20% and go up from there.
Even acknowledging the fact that these are mechanical devices and so will naturally not benefit so greatly from the price drops in other computer hardware, tape backup prices have barely fallen at all in the last 4 years. As higher capacities and speeds are introduced, they just come out at higher and higher pricepoints.
There doesn't need to be an organised cabal - when you have a market which is willing to pay these prices, and where there are often established long-term relationships between the buyers and vendors, it's unsurprising that there hasn't been the same downward pressure on prices. Unlike in consumer hardware, where there is typically little brand loyalty and price-competition is fierce.
Final concrete example: getting SCSI hardware in an external enclosure typically costs about 12% more than when it is bare. At the cheap end, it's about what you'd expect to pay for a decent enclosure. At the expensive end, it's about 3 or 4 times the retail cost of a similar enclosure. Where's the competition driving prices down here?
Oh, and don't be so quick to call people retards. It's rude on a number of levels.