You're completely missing the point. Using your arguement, why bother making Hondas and Toyotas, when Ferrari's and Lamborghini's are far superior. It's a question of target markets, not pure technology. Not everyone needs or can afford Ferrari's, just as not everyone can afford or needs SCSI or fibre channel. For the general public IDE more than fits the bill. IDE is not designed for enterprise servers, so why waste your time trashing them for not being able to do something they weren't designed to do in the first place?
I didn't say you were, that was a general comment, before I got to your post.
ATA/100 is still completely worthless to anyone but marketing types, and is likely to remain so for its service lifetime.
It's worthless now, but it makes more sense to release a standard a year before you need it as opposed to a year after.
Wide SCSI supports up to sixteen devices on the bus at a time
15, the SCSI card is included as a device.
In fact, we could use more bus bandwidth!
Who's we? Speak for yourself.
One thing about the 2 SCSI drives I mentioned. Neither drive I is available for sale yet, leaving the Cheetah XL as the fastest SCSI drive available. The Cheetah maximum STR is only 35MB/s making it slower than the IBM ATA. Leaving IDE holding not only the STR title right now, but the capacity crown as well. All this from the "value" sector of the storage field. ATA beating SCSI in either of these stats would have been unthinkable 2 or 3 years ago.
The rest of your post shows that you obviously don't know who ATA drives are intended for. IDE is a consumer level product, plain and simple. You apparently for whatever reason seem to think that IDE is trying to make inroads into the enterprise sector. 15 devices per bus and theoretical bandwidths of 160MB/s are all fine and dandy, but don't apply to 99.9% of the consumer market. You seem to think that there are loads of people running webservers in their house with a dozen 10k RPM drives in them, which couldn't be further from the truth.
32bit PCI which we all have has a theoretical limit of 133MB/s for the whole bus.
First, don't use "all". Speak for yourself.
Huh? Show me one motherboard available for any current AMD/Intel CPU that doesn't have at least 1 32bit PCI slot.
Personally, I think USB is appropriate for devices like scanners, cameras, and the like. I think SCSI is more appropriate for hard drives, tape drives, and other mass storage systems.
Agreed. Though Firewire will probably take some of the storage market.
Then why does ATA CD-ROM multi-tasking performance still blow chunks, when SCSI systems barely even notice the load? Could it be because the whole ATA subsystem has to STOP and wait for the CD-ROM to complete its transaction before that bus can become free again?
Try busmastering drivers, they work wonders. I don't know what you are doing to make your system grind to a hault using a CDROM drive. Mine certainly doesn't. I get more system hiccups from my Plextor UW than I do from the piece of junk Creative Labs IDE DVD drive.
ATA sucks, pure and simple. Rather then putting money into trying to extend a dead technology, the industry should just switch to SCSI, which is (1) here today (2) widely used (3) a standard and (4) actually works.
To make such a wide sweeping statement is ignorant and shortsighted. Not everyone has the money to buy a $700 motherboard plus $2000+ for hard drives like you do. For the more budget conscience, IDE is far more suitable. $200 for the 30GB IBM 75GXP is far easier to swallow than $500 for a 36GB Cheetah plus $200 for a SCSI card.
First of all, as stated by some others, Windows has already had ATA 100 support. A friend of mine ordered and received an ABIT KA7 board a week ago that had 4 IDE channels on it including 2 ATA 100. Obviously there were windows drivers included with the board.
IBM's latest IDE release, the 75GXP, maxes out at 37MB/s sustained on the outer tracks of the drive which makes it the first IDE drive to surpass the theoretical limit of ATA33. It can be argued that Maxtor's Diamond Max 40+ at just over 30MB/s sustained was the first drive to exceed the real world limit of ATA33. For a comparison basis, the current SCSI speed champs, the Quantum Atlas 10k II and Seagate X15 weigh in at 40 and 41MB/s respectively which is not a significant speed increase.
Now I'm not implying that the IBM drive is anywhere near the performance of the 2 SCSI drives. 10k RPM and 15k RPM drives have significantly lower access time which will give them a distinct speed advantage, but the interface does not limit access time, it limits throughput.
SCSI 160 is bogus at this point, ignoring the fact you will need 4 of either of the above mentioned 2 drives to max the throughput. The problem is that it requires a 64bit PCI slot which no mainstream consumer level board carries. 32bit PCI which we all have has a theoretical limit of 133MB/s for the whole bus.
The release of USB2 will eliminate almost all of SCSI's external peripherals, except for highend hard drives.
Most current gen IDE drives do support command queuing. Whether or not it actually works is anyone's guess, as there is no way to actually test it as far as I know.
Your CDROM comment is about 2 years too late as well. The reason ATA CDROM drives used to kill system performance was due to a lack of DMA, not because IDE could only access one device per bus at a time. The advent of DMA has elminated this bottleneck.
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You're completely missing the point. Using your arguement, why bother making Hondas and Toyotas, when Ferrari's and Lamborghini's are far superior. It's a question of target markets, not pure technology. Not everyone needs or can afford Ferrari's, just as not everyone can afford or needs SCSI or fibre channel. For the general public IDE more than fits the bill. IDE is not designed for enterprise servers, so why waste your time trashing them for not being able to do something they weren't designed to do in the first place?
Which I wasn't disputing.
I didn't say you were, that was a general comment, before I got to your post.
ATA/100 is still completely worthless to anyone but marketing types, and is likely to remain so for its service lifetime.
It's worthless now, but it makes more sense to release a standard a year before you need it as opposed to a year after.
Wide SCSI supports up to sixteen devices on the bus at a time
15, the SCSI card is included as a device.
In fact, we could use more bus bandwidth!
Who's we? Speak for yourself.
One thing about the 2 SCSI drives I mentioned. Neither drive I is available for sale yet, leaving the Cheetah XL as the fastest SCSI drive available. The Cheetah maximum STR is only 35MB/s making it slower than the IBM ATA. Leaving IDE holding not only the STR title right now, but the capacity crown as well. All this from the "value" sector of the storage field. ATA beating SCSI in either of these stats would have been unthinkable 2 or 3 years ago.
The rest of your post shows that you obviously don't know who ATA drives are intended for. IDE is a consumer level product, plain and simple. You apparently for whatever reason seem to think that IDE is trying to make inroads into the enterprise sector. 15 devices per bus and theoretical bandwidths of 160MB/s are all fine and dandy, but don't apply to 99.9% of the consumer market. You seem to think that there are loads of people running webservers in their house with a dozen 10k RPM drives in them, which couldn't be further from the truth.
32bit PCI which we all have has a theoretical limit of 133MB/s for the whole bus.
First, don't use "all". Speak for yourself.
Huh? Show me one motherboard available for any current AMD/Intel CPU that doesn't have at least 1 32bit PCI slot.
Personally, I think USB is appropriate for devices like scanners, cameras, and the like. I think SCSI is more appropriate for hard drives, tape drives, and other mass storage systems.
Agreed. Though Firewire will probably take some of the storage market.
Then why does ATA CD-ROM multi-tasking performance still blow chunks, when SCSI systems barely even notice the load? Could it be because the whole ATA subsystem has to STOP and wait for the CD-ROM to complete its transaction before that bus can become free again?
Try busmastering drivers, they work wonders. I don't know what you are doing to make your system grind to a hault using a CDROM drive. Mine certainly doesn't. I get more system hiccups from my Plextor UW than I do from the piece of junk Creative Labs IDE DVD drive.
ATA sucks, pure and simple. Rather then putting money into trying to extend a dead technology, the industry should just switch to SCSI, which is (1) here today (2) widely used (3) a standard and (4) actually works.
To make such a wide sweeping statement is ignorant and shortsighted. Not everyone has the money to buy a $700 motherboard plus $2000+ for hard drives like you do. For the more budget conscience, IDE is far more suitable. $200 for the 30GB IBM 75GXP is far easier to swallow than $500 for a 36GB Cheetah plus $200 for a SCSI card.
First of all, as stated by some others, Windows has already had ATA 100 support. A friend of mine ordered and received an ABIT KA7 board a week ago that had 4 IDE channels on it including 2 ATA 100. Obviously there were windows drivers included with the board.
IBM's latest IDE release, the 75GXP, maxes out at 37MB/s sustained on the outer tracks of the drive which makes it the first IDE drive to surpass the theoretical limit of ATA33. It can be argued that Maxtor's Diamond Max 40+ at just over 30MB/s sustained was the first drive to exceed the real world limit of ATA33. For a comparison basis, the current SCSI speed champs, the Quantum Atlas 10k II and Seagate X15 weigh in at 40 and 41MB/s respectively which is not a significant speed increase.
Now I'm not implying that the IBM drive is anywhere near the performance of the 2 SCSI drives. 10k RPM and 15k RPM drives have significantly lower access time which will give them a distinct speed advantage, but the interface does not limit access time, it limits throughput.
SCSI 160 is bogus at this point, ignoring the fact you will need 4 of either of the above mentioned 2 drives to max the throughput. The problem is that it requires a 64bit PCI slot which no mainstream consumer level board carries. 32bit PCI which we all have has a theoretical limit of 133MB/s for the whole bus.
The release of USB2 will eliminate almost all of SCSI's external peripherals, except for highend hard drives.
Most current gen IDE drives do support command queuing. Whether or not it actually works is anyone's guess, as there is no way to actually test it as far as I know.
Your CDROM comment is about 2 years too late as well. The reason ATA CDROM drives used to kill system performance was due to a lack of DMA, not because IDE could only access one device per bus at a time. The advent of DMA has elminated this bottleneck.