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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."
I've used these and I can't help fealing that they are a bit over priced. Sure you can get a 120gig SCSI drive for way cheaper then if you got a pure SCSI solution. However you lose the benifits of SCSI in the process (like tag queu reordering). Bottom line is that for most solutions the eftra 100-200$ for these adaptors is close if not more then the price diference between SCSI and IDE to start with. Unless you have an existing device that you wish to use (like putting an IDE CD-RW into an Ultra Sparc station) these things just don't seem worth it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Now I won't have to use that cheapo zip zoom card. Cause, we are sure that this tech will have fewer bugs than any old cheap scsi card.
IDE to SCSI Converters?
2 42257&mode=thread&tid=137
Posted by Cliff on 04:55 AM October 3rd, 2002 from the how-well-do-they-work dept.
ericdano asks: "Addonics has announced a pair of SCSI solutions, which convert common ATAPI devices and IDE hard drives to high-speed SCSI devices on all Windows, Macintosh, and Linux-based computers: the IDE-SCSI converter ($100) for hard drives and the ATAPI-SCSI converter ($110) for ATAPI-based CDRW, DVD-R/RW, DVD-ROM or CD-ROMs. The company has also announced a high-performance single-channel Ultra160 SCSI PCI host controller ($170) with 160MB/sec. data throughput. How safe are these products?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/03/0
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
From this?
Wrong idea. These let you use IDE devices on a SCSI controler.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You mean now I can buy low quality IDE devices and pay losts of money to hook them up to my scsi system? Where do I sign up?
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?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Save your money for neon lights, or plexiglass, or whatever other case mod you were going to blow money on.
I cannot tell you all how many times I have come across this issue. I have seen some ISA adapters that cost upwards of several thousand dollars. Has anyone seen anything better and cheaper?
For the price of an IDE/ATAPI device plus converters, you could get full blown SCSI devices, and not deal with the added parts to break down.
Interesting. Yes.
Practical. Not so sure.
Have you painted a shed today?
...with integrated Babelfish-like translation on the chip so that all my data is written to a SCSI drive in Engrish.
It seems to me (I may be wrong) that the only market for something like this would be for some backwards compatibility and perhaps the odd person that just wants a 10,000 RPM drive.
If someone buys a SCSI drive, chances are they have a SCSI connector. I don't know why anyone would purchase a SCSI drive when they had IDE. IDE is just as fast now, plus much less expensive. So who is this really directed at?
The only logical group I can honestly think of would be people that have SCSI on one machine but just want to switch the drive over to another one without SCSI. But why do that? For the price of $109 for the connector you could just buy another IDE hard drive.
Once again, the only reason why someone would need this is if they are super hardcore and wanted a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive and just wanted to interface it with IDE since those (to my knowledge) are not available yet. However, people with that kind of money probably already have motherboards that support SCSI. That's a fairly narrow audience.
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm trying to get some Slashdot people to tell me why this is a useful thing. Any thoughts?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
ACard have been making a really cool range of SCSI to IDE products for several years now called SCSIDE. They work very well too, especially the mirroring and interface bridge stuff I've had my hands on :)
:)
For more info take a look here
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
I didn't know that the IDE cable, and interface is what "slowed" IDE hard drives down?
Can an adapter and SCSI cabling really make my Maxtor 5400RPM go 160MB/second?
For those not familiar, or trying to respond to others in this forum and don't know what to say: =)
IDE vs. SCSI article at PcMech.
SCSI & IDE Overview Good, informative, classroom materials for a university.
IDE to SCSI Adaptor Review of the ACard ARS-2000FW
ACARD Tech. - Makes SCSI to IDE converters.
These things have been around for years! I've had them for 2.5" SCSI notebooks in SparcBooks. There are pleny of SCSI-IDE bridges over at dirtcheap drives for like $50-$70 depending on whether you want wide or narrow scsi. $100 is too much.
And I've used these to hook up a bunch of 160GB IDE drives together to make a nice big huge raid array. They're great - only if you hook'em up to big drives where SCSI would be too expensive or to hook up DVD or CDRW's to Scsi only machines such as SUNs.
First, someone posts a story (which gets ACCEPTED?) about these converters from Addonics, then an AC (!) posts another story about these converters (again, ACCEPTED - wtf?). Looks like Addonics is trolling.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Just for kicks, I looked up two Seagate hard drives on Pricewatch....I selected the ST336938LW (Ultra160) and ST340016A (ATA100), as both are 40 gig (well, 37 for the SCSI one) with comparable features (~9 ms access times, 7200 RPM). The priced out at $218 for SCSI and $80 for the ATA drive. I can't believe that the controller card costs $140, especially given that I could buy an adapter card for $100 (and still let the add-on card maker make a profit). What exactly is the difference here? It seems like the SCSI drive would have higher quality, although I can't seem to find MTBF numbers for the drives. Anyone who is more knowledgable want to expand on this?
I just contacted Addonics to get a returned materials authorization (RMA) number for my IDE to SCSI adaptor, since it would not work.
/proc/scsi/scsi), but any attempt to actually access sectors on the drive locked the SCSI bus up solid.
Specifically, when I hooked it up to my Maxtor 120G drive and my SGI Indy, the Indy didn't see the drive. Hooking it up to my Linux box's Adaptec controller let me get the drive info (cat
The drive itself works just fine on the Linux box's IDE, as well on my Firewire bay, so that exonerates the drive. The Adaptec works just fine on my scanner, outboard 3G SCSI disk, and CD burner, so that exonerates the Linux box's SCSI controller. The SGI boots fine from its SCSI disks, exonerating the Indy.
I told Addonics all this. Their response - "We've passed that on to our engineers." Two weeks later, when I had heard nothing, I contacted them again. "We are still waiting for our engineers".
At that point I asked for an RMA. After they emailed me the RMA request form, and I faxed it back, they contact me via email - "Have you tried using our SCSI controller card - it works much better with our SCSI card."
Now, were I using some generic SCSI card from a back alley somewhere I could accept this sort of a response, but Adaptec? Excuse me, who CREATED the SCSI standard? Ignoring the fact that I seriously doubt they have a SCSI controller card for my Indy (which is what I am trying to put the drive on).
I'll be interested in hearing anybody else's experiences - after all my experience is just a datum.
But if anybody else has a different IDE to SCSI adaptor they want to recommend, please reply.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The problem is that they still go for about $100 in small quantities, so the question is where is the sweet point given the lower reliability of many IDE drives?
However it does make it possible to put together a SCSI based RAID for remarkably little outlay and normally although you would ditch the drive when a fault occurs, but this board is reusable.
See my journal, I write things there
In our 4-up DVD replicator at work the internal drive controller is SCSI, but the DVD burners are lower-cost Pioneer IDE. The solution is in reverse, but it goes to show that similar devices have existed for some time.
Any spoon would be too big.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As opposed to all those SCSI adapters that don't.
Still, looks like it could be a great product. I'd like to see long-term reliability stats, which obviously can't exist yet, but this bodes well.
You are not the customer.
Usually, what I have done is too simply look for a newer used computer that still has 1 ISA slot left in it. Pentium chipsets still have these here and there up to the Pentium III, and AMD chipsets can be found that use today's Athlon XP 2200's. I myself have a Tbird 1000 running on a KT7A-RAID motherboard that has 1 ISA slot at home, though I don't use the slot. When I built computers for the lab, I used this mobo because of this reason.
kinda on topic. i was wondering if there was a little more native solution for having a box full of ide drives connected to a computer with an external ide interface? right now i have a box with my scsi stuff (tape, mo drive, cdr, cdrw, etc), but i use ide drives because i just cannot beat the price. i have the scsi stuff connected to my computer with a scsi cable.
since putting more than 3 hard drives in my case makes things a little crowded, i was wondering if there was an alternative similar to what i've done with the scsi stuff.
-- john
Err, the answer is painfully obvious.
Write down the cost of a 200GB IDE hard drive (the western digital ones are quite speedy and have 8MB cache). Then add the cost of IDE/SCSI converter.
Now, compare that figure with the cost of a 200GB SCSI drive- *IF* you can even find such a beast.
For bonus points, figure out how much an 8-drive IDE RAID enclosure that presents a SCSI interface to a host computer, or an 8-drive 3ware internal RAID controller will save you when populated with 200GB IDE drives over a pure SCSI solution.
Many usage patterns need high capacity, but not require the benefits that high end SCSI drives provide over IDE. Why pay 5X as much for them if you don't need to?
With a 5-fold savings, you can buy more drives and use a RAID, increasing both your reliability and your performance over a single scsi drive solution.
I love a review that starts off by parroting some incorrect preconception. There are plenty of good SCSI optical drives. Yamaha makes a 44/24/44 CD-RW, Plextor makes a 40/12/40 CD-RW. Pioneer makes 10X DVD-ROM drives, and there are also DVD-RAM and DVD-/+R for SCSI.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Will it fit inside a Sun 411 drive case ... with an IDE drive, of course? It's pretty tight in the back in there. But if it will fit, that would be cool. OK, maybe a little warm. You know what I mean.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Who knows if this is true but I just took an A+ certification course for easy credits and they asserted that many SCSI disks are IDE disks with an IDE to SCSI controller attached to them. This sounded bogus to me, I would think that they would have the same logic on the disk side, and two versions of the chip, one with IDE out and one with SCSI. Either way, can anyone comment on this?
Also I thought part of the new IDE spec was tagged queueing but people are saying that you won't have tagged queueing using one of these devices. First of all doesn't IDE have that now, in the newest devices, or is that a Serial ATA thing? And second, couldn't the SCSI-to-IDE adapter do tagged queueing?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now they need to come out with RAID models. That is, it would have the usual SCSI connector(s), but 2 or more (a model with 2, a model with 4, and a model with 8, would be a nice lineup) IDE connectors. Then you can fill up an external drive case with cheap IDE drives, and attach it via SCSI for a cheap terabyte box. Some means to configure it would be needed and it should default to bunch of disks mode before configured.
The same thing but with a Firewire interface to the computer would be nice, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
http://www.datoptic.com/fwu2-ide.html
- 20 0.htm
d uc ts.htm
http://www.usbgear.com/usa/item_420.html
http://www.veriplus.com/pages/media-storage/UDA
http://www.deltrontech.com/USB/USBIDE/U-IDE.htm
http://www.indigita.com/products/prod_bridgepro
Enter the conversion.
Adaptec makes a pricey 4-port external SCSI card. That's a total of 14*4 usuable drives on a single bus. SCSI drives ARE expensive and when you have 40 of them, it's way more expensive, even with the converters. I see these converters as an ideal way to built multi-Terrabyte arrays at 3/4 or less of the cost of a SCSI array.
I bought such an adapter from a japanese company about 3 years ago. I'm not sure if I bought it from a retailer or directly from the manufacturer, since I had to use a translation tool to convert the japanese characters to figure out how to use the online ordering system.
The box it came in was worth the money alone. A lot of good engrish, like "Will reduce CPU power of system".
Anyway, the adapter is alive and works fine in my SGI Indigo 2 workstation, with a 27 GB IBM-drive.
These devices will cause SCSI drive manufacturers to produce cheaper drives.
Is there a technical reason you couldn't take a 200GB IDE drive and make it a native SCSI drive? Not really. The physical parts of the drive aren't dependant on the interface. Western Digital could just as easily make a 250GB SCSI drive as they can a 250GB IDE.
So why aren't SCSI manufacturers doing this? Until now they've been able to prop up the margins in the SCSI market by keeping it a 'high end' product. The SCSI drives you stick in your servers are often better peices of hardware than your cheapo IDE drives. I've got 18GB SCSI drives here that are built like bricks. They aren't cheap drives with SCSI controllers instead of IDE. Building cheap drives with SCSI would begin to erode their high end market. That's why they won't do it.
However, someone just did it for them. Now that the market has been opened, look for drive manufacturers to start releasing large SCSI drives. If they don't, they lose this midrange market segment AND the high end market still takes a hit.
Tech prediction for 2003: 200GB SCSI drives for $400 to $500 bucks.
At several points in the review they credit the devices with being U160.
Unfortuantely, according to Addonics own marketing materials, the adapters top out at U80.
SO we've got a very limited review, of an expensive item, that allows you to use cheaply made drives on server class systems, putting your data at greater risk. And the "review" has technical errors in it.
I think I'll pass.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Ive spent a lot of time with microtech dvd duplicators - they use these adapters. Specifically, I was able to connect 12 IDE DVD-R devices to a PC several feet away by using IDE to SCSI adapters and a couple of nice long SCSI cables. Beats the IDE ribbon cable limitation problem, and allows you to spread your devices out, instead of trying to cram a bunch of devices into one box.
However, a comparison between modern IDE-SCSI converters and drives IS a news story.
like how the Seagate drive has wonky performance using a converter.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
These products are NOT new others have been making them for years.w .html or this onew .html this one looks alot like the one addonics is selling doesn't it?
Here is one that mounts UNDER a low profile (aren't most of them like this?) ide
drive making it about the same height as an atapi cdrom drive.
http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/ars-2000f
http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/aec-7720u
Just because some company gets a write up on something at linuxhardware.org
does not make it new or news.
sparkeyjames
If sense were common everyone would have it!
Assuming that you have a metric fuckton of cash to blow, you could make one hell of a RAID system with this and a SCSI card that I have. Go to eBay and buy an IBM ServeRAID 3 SCSI card. This is a card that does RAID onboard, and has 3 Adaptec chips on it for a total capacity of 45 (!) drives (15 per channel, 3 channels). Grab one of those for the whole $35 it cost me to buy originally, 45 SCSI -> IDE controllers, and 45 320GB IDE drives. Instant 14.4 TB raid array! You can only use one channel per raidset, so you'd really have 3x 5tb logical drives to work with (or just 45 drives to software-raid together), but still! Imagine a beowulf cluster of the porn stored on that!
Total cost:
$35 ServeRAID controller
$4500 45x IDE-SCSI adapters @ $100 ea
$23625 45x 320gb IDE drives @ $525 ea
$100 Shitload of cabling
$400 Good enclosure for 45 drives
Total price: $28,660 for 14.4TB, or $1.99 per GB (Price goes up a bit if you use RAID5, as capacity is dropped some)
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Go to the TPC website and take a look at score reports for the TPC-C benchmark, which is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark going back 10 years or so.
Score reports for most mid-end IA-32 quad-processor servers reveal that they are using several four-channel Ultra-160 SCSI RAID controllers, and fifteen hard drives per channel. My professional experience with TPC-C shows that the hard drives' throughput get maxed out way before the SCSI channel bandwidth does, and we're talking 15 drives per SCSI channel. That's why these benchmark results are still obtained with Ultra-160 controllers and drives instead of Ultra-320. The extra bus bandwidth of Ultra-320 SCSI doesn't buy you much because the fastest disks out there cannot churn out data fast enough to max out a Ultra-160 interface.
I was recently looking at both IDE and SCSI drive specs on manufacturers' websites. I saw Ultra-160 and Ultra-320 SCSI devices with seek times of 3.5 ms and rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM. But most IDE drive families are still at 7,200 RPM max and have seek times of 8.5 ms or more. The better seek times and rotational speeds are the main reason I would upgrade my storage to SCSI (if the costs were not so high, that is :-). The product reviewed here provides exactly the reverse of the functionality I want. As such, I think it's useful only for specialized applications like putting an IDE CD-RW in a SCSI-only workstation or server.
SCSI is a parallel interface standard used by Apple Macintosh computers, PCs, and many UNIX systems for attaching peripheral devices to computers. Nearly all Apple Macintosh computers, excluding only the earliest Macs and the recent iMac, come with a SCSI port for attaching devices such as disk drives and printers.
This info is a bit outdated. Every Mac since 1999 comes with on board IDE instead of SCSI. The consumer Macs even had IDE back in 1996 (when I got a Performa 6300). Apple switched from SCSI to IDE in the pro-line when they released the B&W G3s. Today PCI SCSI cards are a BTO option in PowerMacs.
SCSI was also used by graphics pros to hook scanners up to. Printers were more often on the printer port (a serial Mac port) or on a network connection.
The problem with all of these IDE vs. SCSI performance discussions is that "performance" is a context-sensitive term.
Today's IDE drives can probably push more streamed data per unit time through an interface, however, if you can't afford intermittent burps in sustained throughput, SCSI still outperforms, and once you load a bus with multiple drives and try to use them simultaneously, IDE really begins to falter because the IDE specification is not terribly friendly to bus sharing.
And of course in database-type environments with many, many seek and small read and write operations going on, IDE drives completely suck in comparison to the much smaller average access and command queueing of SCSI.
So it depends on what "performance" means to you...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
SCSI drives are in reality, nothing more than a standard ATA device with a SCSI interface circuit built into the logic board.
In reality, you don't have the vaguest idea what you are talking about.
SCSI drives are engineered to run continuously, with constant access, for 5+ years. IDE drives, with the exception of one unreleased Maxtor, are designed to run with normal desktop use for 3+ years.
SCSI drives are available in 10,000 and 15,000RPM spindle speeds, with access times as low as 3.5 milliseconds.
IDE drives are available on 5400 and 7200 RPM speeds with the lowest of access times being three times that.
The ATA protocol isn't even a subset of the SCSI protocol. The ATA spec has no tagged command queueing. It has no method of forcing a write to disk synchronously. It has no method of detaching a drive, connecting to another, and issuing commands while the previous drive is working on the commands you just gave it.
Please refrain from "informing" Slashdot readers of your "knowledge" in the future.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
This "review" [tomshardware.com] claims Western Digital's IDE drive outperforms SCSI.
Ahh, so you're one of those people who thinks Tom's Hardware reviewers have the slightest idea what they're talking about.
Interesting.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
aka the web page, clearly state U80.
I don't have the device, so I didn't have a manual handy to whip out. I suppose I could have dug a little deeper, but I assumed the company would put their *best* foot forward with their marketing. Rare to see someone understate their products capabilities.
If I'd been reviewing a product that over-delivered, I'd probably mention in the review, that the product did more than it promised.
After reading the review, I flipped over to the website, and the U80 spec jumped out at me.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I've had the privilege of using one of these at work. But it seems that I'm using it for a completely different purpose than the typical /.er.
;)
At work, I manage several HP-UX workstations. These are older models (B132L+, B180L) and only have SCSI interfaces -- no IDE.
We're currently looking into DVD-RW and related media for data archiving. But all of the reasonably priced DVD writing drives are IDE, not SCSI. The only SCSI DVD writer I found, last time I looked around the web, ran $2500!
A Sony DVD+RW IDE drive costs $300. An IDE-to-SCSI converter costs around $65. You also need a Y-cable for the power, since the B-series workstations don't have a third power cable for the adapter. (The one we're using requires external power.) Anyway, cram that all inside the case (not trivial, but possible) and you get a SCSI DVD writer that works just fine in HP-UX for less than $400 USD.
Now, if only there were actually DVD+RW software available for non-Linux systems... that would make my life much easier. But I'll settle for DVD-RW.
If by "base hardware" you mean that they are made with platters, actuators, circuit boards, etc. then you are indeed correct. IDE and SCSI drives even share certain parts sometimes, such as the casing, motors, sometimes platters.
Low-end SCSI drives, like the Seagate Barracuda, are quite similar to mid- and high-end IDE drives. There are huge differences in the electronics, but for the most part, parts should be interchangeable. (how much this is done on low-end drives, I do not know)
However, most people I know of who buy SCSI do so for performance.
Performance SCSI drives are quite different. For example, 15K drives use much smaller platters, probably because it is difficult to get a standard platter stable at such high speeds. (remember, because the head floats just thousandths of a meter above the platters, the slightest wobble can cause a head crash). Because of this, they also use a different casing, different actuators, etc. Because of the rotational speed, they use a different motor. Because it is SCSI, the electronics are different.
As far as the core technologies used, though, IDE and SCSI are extremely similar, however your comment:
Was completely and utterly incorrect.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
OTOH for the price of one SCSI drive you can buy a larger IDE drive, a hot spare, and two or three standby spares, and by the time you have to spin up the last one the price of replacing it will be inconsequential (assuming you can still find a drive that small). With RAID, MTBF is only crucial if you deploy a box somewhere an admin can't lay hands on it. SCSI's typical spin rates are nice if price is no object.
If Mr. Mueller said that SCSI drives are "...nothing more than a standard ATA device with a SCSI interface circuit built into the logic board", as a general sweeping statement, then he is wrong. Yes, he published a great PC repair book. Great.
However, Whenever someone disagrees with reality, reality always wins.
Open up a Seagate Cheetah X15 if you don't believe me.
And if you'll notice, I was not intending to be a "smart ass." I thought my last reply was quite polite. Yours, however, was not.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
in reality, you are wrong. Gee, who should I believe? An industry legend, or some putz on /. ?
Quite true, you do not know me and it would be unwise to believe an anonymous person on Slashdot over a person who is certainly an industry legend. Honestly, you probably misinterpreted what he wrote. In any case, if you didn't, that's why I said that you could open up a drive and see for yourself. Reality doesn't lie.
"Open up a Seagate Cheetah X15 if you don't believe me."
Hrm let me see, what will I find: A spindle motor a platter array a head assembly.
Yes, a spindle motor which you will not find in an IDE hard drive (unless you know of any 15,000RPM hard drives), platters of a special size made specifically for 15K SCSI hard drives, which you will also not find in any IDE hard drive (though it is indeed the same basic core technology, as I have already stated), and a head assembly which has been shortened in length for the smaller platters, an assembly which you will--again--not find in an IDE hard drive.
Go to www.storagereview.com and ask a person named "MaxtorSCSI"--he is a SCSI engineer at Maxtor.
Now go and look under the hood of a Ford Pinto and a Mercedes. Hmm, let's see. Pistons, valves, a radiator. They must be the same!
See how rediculous your example is now?
Probably not.
Should we look on the outside? Oh gee look! there's a Logic board and it has a GASP! SCSI interface IC on it. Wow, amazing.
If you think that the circuit boards on IDE and SCSI drives are the same (other than cosmetic items like the cable connection and a single IC), you are far more misinformed than I originally expected. The entire design philosophy of the electronics on the two is completely different. SCSI drives include much of the controller hardware on, well, the controller. IDE drives are designed to be run by a very simple controller, integrating most of the controlling hardware onto the drive itself. If you read the book, you will notice IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics.
You make alot of half-assed assertions which are just flat wrong.
I am stating facts. Facts which you can find out for yourself if you do a little research.
Just looking At the specs for a WD Protégé 5400 (which is their low end drive) they specify a 5 year service life, with a standard MTBF of 500,000 hours.
Thanks for bringing that up. Now look at Western Digital's warranty policy. The high-end drives have a warranty of, you guessed it, three years. All other drives have a warranty of one year. This is the industry standard, adopted by all major IDE drive manufacturers I know of except Samsung (who makes very reliable, if a bit slow, drives)
That said, there are IDE drives which are supposed to be designed to last five years. By "designed to last 5 years" I mean that the manufacturer will actually back that up with a warranty, service life be damned. The company is Maxtor.
However, if you look at the specs you love so much, you will find that the access times are magnificently faster on their SCSI drives than on their IDE drives. Same hardware indeed. I mentioned these drives earlier, IIRC.
However, I don't need to quote specs or policies to point out that it is absurd to believe a consumer-grade IDE drive is built to the same specifications as drives designed to work in enterprise servers, such as Sun Fire 15K's and HP Nonstop Himilayas, 24/7. If you believe that, you are clearly an idiot.
You have also demonstrated that you are rather misinformed to quote MTBF numbers. Do the math on 500,000 hours and tell me how realistic and useful that number is. If you're nice, I'll tell you where they come up with that figure, since you seem to be averse to doing your own research, outside of your deity's PC repair book.
Dude, lay it down ok, you're not going to convince me of anything because I know you are wrong.
I don't particularly care if I convince you. I am doing my part to quell ignorance in an area I have knowledge of. Others have done the same for me, though I wasn't such a prick in return. You are clearly more interested in believing you are correct than in finding out for yourself. This is not unlike a Fundamentalist: "The bible says it, so it must be true!"
Your bible is Upgrading and Repairing PCs. "It" is your SCSI comment.
If you would like to quote the author, I would be happy to tell you how you misinterpreted him, or if you did not, how he is incorrect, and point you to references. If you would rather insult me, which you seem to be very interested in doing, please do the entire online community a favor and stick with AOL chatrooms or wherever you go to get people to agree with you.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I've used IDE-SCSI convertors with IDE CDR burners.
In Unices, they work wonderfully, which is fine by me. But a friend of mine, who uses Windows mostly, bought a Sony CDRW drive, Adaptec SCSI controller and an IDE-SCSI convertor.
In my system (OpenBSD), it all works fine, but in his Windows machine, most software we tried (Latest Nero, EZCD, etc) would not find the CDRW drive. They would scan the IDE and SCSI busses, but not find any drive that they "know" it seems. With the Sony plugged in to the IDE bus, there was no problem. It's as if they can only use drive models that they are aware of, rather than falling back on a generic driver.
Burning from within WinXP's built in burning worked fine, but bloody slow to even get to the point of burning.
BTW, Yamaha's new SCSI burners are actually IDE burners with Yamaha supplied IDE-SCSI convertors.
The unit we tried is an ARC760 based unit from here.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?