[PLUG] Reasonably-priced SCSI Drives?
Geoff Burling
llywrch at agora.rdrop.com
Tue Apr 20 17:09:02 UTC 2004
On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Paul Mullen wrote:
> A question for the list's SCSI aficionados:
>
> Where do you shop for reasonably-priced SCSI hard disk drives? By
> reasonably-priced, I mean something that's at least close to competitive
> with run-of-the-mill IDE drives. I realize that there's a price to pay
> for SCSI's performance advantages, but I have had a difficult time
> finding any SCSI drives that are less than 10k RPM. The prices (again,
> relative to IDE) are exorbitant, and the capacities are usually less,
> too.
About a year ago, when I was buying some new SCSI drives, I bought them
off of eBay: Fujitsu MAE3182LPs for about $40.--, IIRC. Not the cutting
edge of technology, but a safe step or back from said sharp point. It also
helped that the mother board in my current computer has 2 built-in SCSI
controllers.
>
> Is there such a thing as a SCSI HDD that approaches $1/GB, or am I
> better off buying an ATA controller and a cheap IDE drive?
>
I bet you can find some old 1 to 5 Gig SCSI HDD for $1/GB. Otherwise,
I doubt it. But then, one of the strengths of SCSI is that adding storage
is the same as adding another hard drive: you don't run into the limitations
of 4 devices (at most) per adapter, & you take advantange of the
multi-tasking ability of the SCSI interface.
Which leads to this rule about the practicality of SCSI: that if you are
going to have 5 or more storage devices (CDROM, hard drives, Zip drives,
etc.), then it makes sense to set use SCSI; if you will only have a single
hard drive, DVD/CDROM drive, & maybe one other peripheral, it frankly makes
better sense to stick with IDE.
Geoff
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