[rescue] Macs & IDE vs. SCSI

[Dave McGuire]

On Saturday, April 12, 2003, at 03:46 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Now just suppose all the work that's been put into developing 
> successive
> generations of IDE/ATA had been put into improving SCSI instead, and
> building less expensive SCSI hardware.  It's interesting to speculate
> what the price/performance of SCSI would be right now.  I'm betting 
> it'd
> cost little, if any, more than IDE does.

   I agree.  But even in the current world, SCSI doesn't *need* much 
improving, except for maybe dropping the cost...which is a business 
problem, not a technical one.

   Improve on Ultra320?  Drive mechanics & media can't touch that 
transfer rate as it is; the headroom is there to support multiple 
drives per bus.  Need even more than that?  Think FibreChannel...SCSI 
protocols over an ultra-high-speed transport.

> I gotta admit, though, it'd be sweet to get rid of all these damned
> ribbon cables and have little tiny 8mm ISDN-ish disk cables instead.
> Imagine how much less cluttered PC cases would be if instead of being
> full of airflow-blocking 50- and 68-pin ribbon cable, you just had an
> input and an output port on each disk and little jumper cables that you
> plugged from drive to drive, with an active terminator plugged directly
> into the last disk's output port.

   Well, there's FibreChannel...

        -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "My belly these days is too substantial
St. Petersburg, FL           for most hosiery."       -Robert Novak