IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed

Anonymous Coward writes "Seems that someone has finally come out with IDE/ATAPI to SCSI converters to bridge the gap between the high-cost SCSI world and the low-cost IDE world. Addonics is the company and LinuxHardware.org has a full review of these two devices. The review does a good job of laying out installation and performance. These are just what I've been looking for and although a little pricey, they seem to do the job."

Comments

Re:Wish I could read the article.....

[Kenja]

Wrong idea. These let you use IDE devices on a SCSI controler.

so

[tps12]

So instead of buying SCSI drives, you save money by getting cheaper, faster, but less dependable IDE drives and then shell out the price difference to adapt it to your slower SCSI bus. This seems like the worst of both worlds to me. Am I missing something?

Re:so

[pmz]

...slower SCSI bus.

Troll.

Ever since 40MB/sec SCSI came out...there really is no need for anything faster in a workstation...until hard drives become dramatically faster. Most workstations have no more than two hard drives (get it? 2 X 20MB/sec = 40MB/sec).

Only servers and workstations with massive external storage arrays benefit from multiple high-bandwidth SCSI controllers, such as FibreChannel, Ultra160 or Ultra320. Those bus speeds handle the aggregate bandwidths of the hard drives.

...faster, but less dependable IDE drives...

I still don't see 10,000 or 15,000RPM IDE drives, do you?

In Case It Gets Slashdotted, Here's The Summary

[robbyjo]

The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts. Amazing!

IDE to SCSI converter = US$99, ATAPI to SCSI converter = US$109. Both are MSRP.

IMHO, that's a really good bargain. This also proves that the real bottleneck in the IDE drives is actually that for one IDE bus, only one device can be active at a time.

Re:In Case It Gets Slashdotted, Here's The Summary

[pmz]

The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts.

I'd like to see real non-single-user benchmarks. Multi-user UNIX environments and/or RAID are where SCSI shines. I trust SCSI's ability to aggregate the drives to truly utilize the bus' bandwidth better than I would trust IDE. IDE has always been designed from the single-user PC point of view.

I remember seeing a review of IDE RAID controllers a while back. The aggregate performance shown on the benchmarks was disappointing (gaining only a couple percent performance gain from a striped or mirrored array)--I'd think much better should be possible.

Re:I've used these and....

[Dimensio]

Where can you get a cheap 120GB SCSI drive?

I've a nice Adaptec card, the 18GB SCSI drive that I have in my machine still costs more now than the 120GB IDE drive that I stuffed in recently.

Yes, you are missing something

[wowbagger]

For those of us who have older Unix workstations that don't know how to spell IDE, these allow us to put a decent amount of storage on them for a reasonable cost.

If you are buying IDE drives, and IDE to SCSI converters, and a SCSI card, to put into your x86 box, then yes, you need to order a nice big bowl of InstaClue.

But if you are trying to install the Gnu development tools onto an old SGI Indy, this is a great idea.

If it works - see my other post in this thread.

Wrong way, Feldmen....

[wowbagger]

The idea is not to place a SCSI drive on an IDE bus, but to place an IDE drive on a SCSI bus.

You might try reading the article before posting - sometimes there's actually useful information there.

They didn't do the obvious test..

[Anonymous Coward]

IDE interface -> IDE to SCSI convertor -> SCSI to IDE convertor -> IDE drive.

That would have been a very good test as to the quality of the convertors - making sure that their emulation is consistent and correct.