I'm not sure if we are living on the same planet here.. I have had
nothing but grief with IDE devices. Problems include (but are not
limited to) two Maxtor branded drives that would not coexist as master
and slave on the same interface, buggy Intel PCI controller
implementations that throw all sorts of errors at will and basically
sluggish performance under multiple-process concurrent I/O.
SCSI, on the other hand, has been absolutely and utterly reliable. My
486/100 EISA box with Adaptec 2742 SCSI bussmaster adapter just blows
the doors off a Pentium 90 box when subjected to my standard I/O test
suite. It's quite subjective, but you attempt to simultaneously:
- ftp in/out a 16-meg file over a 115.2k serial link (IRQ load)
- run Bonnie (or iozone) on an NFS-mounted partition (more IRQ load)
- start a kernel compilation (disk subsystem load)
while
- Trying to get useful work done on the X display
I guarantee you that the difference will not be subtle. IDE is great
for casual use and the Dos/Win crowd, but there is a good reason why
most (all?) serious server boxes use SCSI.
- Steve