Re: [PLUG] scsi vs ide

[Mental Patient <mental@neverlight.com>]

Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> I used to have scsi disks. My new machine, faster, has ide drives. The
> old machine rarely skipped on playing ogg/mp3 files. The new one does
> often. It suffices to do something compute or mildly disk intensive
> (like untarring something big or an apt-get).
>
> Do others have this experience? I'm wondering if this is a scsi/ide
> thing or just a difference between the two machines. Like maybe my new
> machine has a slow ide controller or something.

SCSI is hands down MUCH faster. For instance, I could play quake3 while 
burning cd's or compiling a kernel without issues (everything was scsi, 
and the hd was a 10k rpm cheetah). However, I'm unable to justify the 
cost vs space. I have found that while performance is nowhere near that 
of a scsi system, by tuning the HD parameters with hdparm I can achieve 
a reasonably usable system. IE, mp3's no longer skip while I build 
software or do a dist-upgrade. I still cant do a lot of things I used to 
be able to do, but the way I use my computer I find that its an 
acceptable trade off. I simply cannot justify the cost of SCSI disks vs 
the sheer space you can have with IDE. Someday when I'm a bit more 
wealthy I'll probably go back to SCSI. IDE is certainly a compromise, 
however it can be tuned and right now I can deal with waiting the extra 
2 seconds for maps to load in quake3 :)



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