[K12OSN] Just got approval - scsi or not

Julius Szelagiewicz julius at turtle.com
Thu Mar 4 15:10:05 UTC 2004


> On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 08:14, Paul Vittorino wrote:
>> >
>> > That was probably the case a few years ago, but now I think
>> > nearly all manufacturers take exactly the same mechanical
>> > parts and slap on a different logic board.  There is still
>> > the bottleneck with head position and since IDE is cheaper
>> > you'll probably buy bigger drives that make this even worse.
>> >
>> I would actually tend to agree with David here.  My sole evidence is
>> the warranty of the drives. Maxtor has a 1 year warranty for their IDE
>> & SATA drives but a 5 year warranty on their SCSI drives.
>>
>
> I wouldn't base technical decisions on marketing ploys. You
> see the same thing in car batteries where you can buy
> exactly the same construction for wildly different prices
> and what you get for a lot of extra money is just the
> longer warranty.  Remember that if the drive breaks in
> 4 years you'll get an exact replacement even though
> by then it will likely be obsolete and you'd rather
> have something up to date.

Les,
 I think we have beat this subject to death a few months ago, but it seems
that in the current discussion  one important fact got lost: scsi drives
*do* last longer, and with a good reason. it is not construction nor
workmanship - it is the intelligence of the embedded software. the one
big difference is request queuing, which when done right and combined
with predictive read ahead minimizes the head movments. the head movments
are the culprit behind the need for recalibration and behind most of the
mechanical failures (i remember reading somewhere the number 98%).
julius





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