I'd call that a failure of backwards compatability; modern IDE drives
are perfectly happy to interoperate with each other, but if you go back
4-5 years, God Help You. (But who, aside from me, still puts 80mb
IDE drives into hardware? If you have to buy them new, it's much
cheaper to buy a 1-2gb modern EIDE or UIDE drive than it is to pay a
collector for another Maxtor 7120.)
>> drives etc for SCSI without having to buy an extra card. Anybody who
>> buys a SCSI CD-ROM these days has too much money and too little sense.
>
>Or has been burned by IDE too often.
Or who has bought into the SCSI mystique. It's hard to justify buying
SCSI CD-ROMS on modern hardware, even if you're an otherwise pure SCSI
system, because you get the controllers on the motherboard, the drives
cost half as much as similar SCSI drives, and the demands on the media
aren't that great.
My personal experience with IDE vs SCSI CD-ROMS on a Unix platform is
that they behave identically (there are slight differences in
performance, but it's like choosing one brand of SCSI CD-ROM over
another) and have the same system loads as each other. And IDE is
cheap enough so I can spring for Wide SCSI BusLogic or Advansys
controllers instead of narrow.
>I won't put an IDE peripheral on this machine for my own use, ever. Bad
>enough that I have to live with them at work. (And even there, servers
>usually are SCSI - the few with IDE are *painfully* slow.)
It depends on your application.
I run a production news, mail, dns, and webserver off a IDE/SCSI
system (everything except the news articles live on an IDE disk; the
news articles live on a little SCSI disk because I needed to put a
SCSI controller in to run the tape backup.) The performance is
distressingly similar to my development server, which is all
ultra-scsi on IBM disks. (Why do I keep this machine running under
SCSI? It's still marginally easier to configure and the high-capacity
tape drives that I require are still SCSI-only.)
____
david parsons \bi/ And this is because Linux has an excellent IDE subsystem
\/ in the kernel.