[rescue] U10 IDE?

[Peter Corlett]

Nathan Raymond <nate at portents.com> wrote:
[...]
> Hmm, how do adapted IDE drives compare in performance to, say,
> 7200RPM 3.5" half height Seagate Barracuda drives, which in SCA (80
> pin) form, go for $50 for the 50GB model (and can be adapted to 68
> or 50 pin for about $5)?

My adaptor is for SCSI-2, so the performance is limited by the SCSI-2
bus. However, when I benchmarked the streaming/sustained transfer rate
of a disk (a 120GB 7200RPM "SAMSUNG SV1204H") connected to one of
these, it managed the maximum theoretical 10MB/s of the SCSI bus.

The same disk does 25MB/s on a UDMA66 controller. If I had a fast+wide
SCSIDE converter, I'd benchmark it for you, but I'd expect to see
25MB/s.

The main reason for adapting these disks would be to get SCSI
presentation so you gain SCSI features such as having more than one
disk per controller, being able to mount the disks externally, being
able to use proper RAID controllers rather than nasty HPT370s, etc,
etc.

> Unless the IDE drives perform significantly better, or you need 1/3
> height mechanisms, why not use 50GB native SCSI drives?

Erm, because I can't get 50GB SCA disks for $50, or I'd have bought
half a dozen...

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