Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards

bjschrock writes "Tech-Junkie reports that Asus is rolling out new motherboards with the new Serial ATA interface, along with AGP 8X support. Serial ATA will soon become pretty popular with the release of new hardware like the Seagate Baracudda ATA V hard drive, that sports a 8MB cache. The main advantage of Serial ATA, besides a slight speed increase, is the much smaller cable and the ability to hot-swap."

Comments

Re:changes in SCSI land ?

[blaine]

Pretty much nothing is happening with SCSI.

The fact is, SCSI is overpriced. It has always been overpriced, and people have always known it. The only reason that it was still popular despite the price gouging was the fact that nothing else could even begin to approach the performance that it had.

Thankfully, times have changed. I'm not saying that ATA drives have yet surpassed SCSI. I'm sure that SCSI3 is probably still the fastest thing out there. But, realistically, who cares? Aside from large scale servers that absolutely need to have that kind of speed, nobody wants SCSI. Don't believe me? Go over to PriceWatch, and try to find a SCSI CD-R or CD-RW. I tried to replace my aging 8x SCSI CD-R recently, and ended up buying an IDE CD-RW, because all that was available in SCSI was outdated crap. Nobody makes SCSI devices targeted at anything other than servers anymore, and while it may be true that SCSI was never really aimed at consumers, at least there used to be a decent selection of devices to choose from. Nowadays, there is nothing.

What it comes down to is this: SCSI is pointless in consumer-land, and even in the land of high end home users. Nobody wants to pay exorbitant prices for a technology that is only marginally better than ATA. Given the choice of paying about $1.40 per gigabyte for ATA, or paying $5.00 per gigabyte for SCSI, I'm going to go with ATA, and so is everyone else.