From: Benjamin Z. Goldsteen (ben@rex.uokhsc.edu)
Date: 05/18/93


From: ben@rex.uokhsc.edu (Benjamin Z. Goldsteen)
Subject: Re: IDE vs SCSI and performance
Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 21:24:07 GMT

ykhan@gandalf.ca (Yousuf Khan) writes:

>In <C72CAw.B47@sugar.NeoSoft.COM> peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>I was talking to a fellow in a computer store the other day, and he was
>>insisting that he was getting 2.5 MB/s on his IDE drives under AmigaOS,
>>over twice what he got with SCSI.

>I don't think that IDEs are available for Amigas yet, are they? IDEs
>as far back as I can remember were designed with the IBM PC AT ISA
>bus in mind specifically. Even the XT ISA bus was not part of the
>scheme. However they did build adapters to make it work on an XT
>ISA bus, and I think they've even made adapters to make it work
>on a PS/2 MCA bus now. So who knows maybe its available for the
>Amigas.

>>I found that hard to beleive... I suspected that his benchmark was being
>>messed up by buffering.

>It's likely buffering. There's not a drive in existence that can
>transfer at that rate without some kind of hardware or software
>buffering. People like to point out the _potential_ speed of
>SCSI hardware, but they all ignore the fact that no SCSI drive
>even approaches this potential. The potential in an IDE might
>be lower than a SCSI's potential, but so far they are pretty
>equal in the real world.

I wouldn't really say that... Quite a few of the high-end drives are
actually rather decent. I have a reference for a MO disk system that
sustains 12MBytes/second (I have no idea how much this costs...)

Low-end SCSI's versus IDE might be about the same...

-- 
Benjamin Z. Goldsteen