Re: SCSI disks
Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Mon, 2 Jun 1997 21:38:40 +0100 (BST)
> I hate to continue to beat this subject into the ground, but exactly what are
> SCSI hard drives considered to the superior to IDE? According to the fellow
> who wrote "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" (who, as a PC technician, I don't
> wholly trust), SCSI hard disks a mostly IDE disks with an additional SCSI
> interface, (ie, the head-disk-assembly is the same, and most of the control
> electronics.) Does SCSI provide additional commands which permit finer
> tuning and/or error prevention/correction than IDE?
For cheap SCSI drives this is basically true, however you will still get
materially higher performance with SCSI. You also get far far better
error handling.
At the high end you get stuff like the 7200 rpm drives which you cant
get IDE.
The sort of stuff SCSI gives you is
1. Advisory warnings of blocks that needed retries
2. The ability to remap blocks for you
3. The ability to reformat the disk for real
4. Commands to scan the entire disk and remap any iffy looking
blocks without losing data