[ale] EIDE vs SCSI
Stephan Uphoff
ups at tree.com
Tue Oct 6 12:09:52 EDT 1998
Matthew Brown wrote:
>I use EIDE almost all the time and have seen very little actual trouble with
>it. Is it slower? Well, maybe, but a single user probably would not notice
>it that much unless they are really pumping data - not number-crunching! -
>actually pumping data (web serving, database work, etc.)
I agree that the performance difference should be small to nonexistent
on a single user system.
There is however a reliability difference:
The last time I looked SCSI drives typically had a MTBF
(Mean time between failures) between 800000 - 1000000 hours.
IDE drives typically had a MTBF between 250000 - 300000 hours.
This translate for a linux system that runs day and night that
the probability of getting a hard disk failure in the first year is:
SCSI Drive: 1.1% - 0.8%
IDE Drive: 3.5% - 2.9%
(This might have changed in the meantime and I have also seen cheap SCSI drives
with only 500000 MTBF)
The MTBF describes the case that the whole drive is going bad
- there are other important issues concerning read / write failures
This is a marketing issue and has nothing to do with the
electrical/protocol/performance of IDE vs SCSI interface
Is the reliability difference worth the price - difference ?
Depends on what the drives are used for.
Stephan
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