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."

Comments

Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers.....

[Rolo Tomasi]

You've got to face it, SCSI is almost dead. SCSI harddrives aren't (much) faster than their ATA counterparts (the high-RPM SCSI drives have a lower latency, but this is insignificant for most applications), they are not more reliable (on the contrary), and they cost ten times as much. Other than harddrives, new SCSI products aren't being designed (apart from niche products maybe). The only real advantage of SCSI, being able to attach many harddrives to achieve high transfer rates, is gone with the advent of cheap professional ATA-RAID controllers like the Adaptec 2400. And Serial ATA will do dismiss the last remaining practical flaw of ATA, the cabling.

Kludgy systems persist, while the intelligent designs die. Betamax anyone? How many of you drive a car with a Wankel engine? This is the sorry fate of humanity.