*BSD News Article 42477


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From: vnr0001@jove.acs.unt.edu (Vijay Narayan Ramasubramanian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.os2.misc
Subject: Re: IDE bad? was Re: List of recommended hardware components
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.os2.misc
Date: 15 Feb 1995 01:38:16 GMT
Organization: University of North Texas
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Peter da Silva (peter@bonkers.taronga.com) wrote:

> Only if you bought a premium SCSI controller. There have been cheap SCSI
> controllers for quite a while, all at least as good as IDE (which is to
> say not that very good) and the drive prices for equivalent SCSI and IDE
> drives were within a few tens of dollars (or in the case of some vendors
> like Quantum, the same).

I really don't think you can beat the price performance from a Promise 
EIDE2300plus+Quantum Lightning 730...the performance advantage is just 
not there.  And how many people want more than 2 fast HDDs?  While a lot 
of people might post in response to that question, they are the 
minority.  I think that IDE succeeded because of its price and ease 
of use.  I really don't agree with Mr. da Silva about why IDE 
succeeded...anyway, I don't think you will find many people who believe 
that IDE/EIDE is faster/more powerful/flexible...its just cheap, easy to 
set up, and fast enough...
 
 > What killed SCSI over IDE was that the 
screwdriver shops didn't like
> it, because they couldn't pump margins down as far. When you're running
> on a margin of a few tens of dollars (or in some cases running at a loss
> and living on the interest you earn between getting paid and paying for
> your components net 30) then the price becomes more critical. But for
> the end user the price difference between SCSI and IDE was small or was
> artificially inflated by some fella in a strip center.

--
-Vijay Ram (vnr0001@jove.acs.unt.edu)