[rescue] ide vs scsi

[biscjohn at locutus.isu.edu]

On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 09:29:13PM -0400, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> > But being on the recovery side of a year and a half of unemployment,
> > I've got SCSI tastes on an IDE budget right now.
>
> Exactly.  *THIS* is why I use IDE - I can throw an 80G disk in the
> machine that serves these lists and web pages for less than $100 nowdays -
> while doing it SCSI would require 2 drives and a PCI SCSI controller.

Two drives, maybe.  Why would you need a interface-specific SCSI
controller?  Why can't a good old AHA-1542 do?  This is the reason I love
the hell out of SCSI, especially for rescue purposes: with very few
notable exceptions, a SCSI device "off the shelves" today is compatible
with SCSI controllers of a decade (or longer) ago:  all you have to do is
some cable-fu to get the device actually hooked up and watch for that
godawful differential SCSI snafu of '95-ish.  Compare this to IDE, where a
1995 IDE-based machine means that LBA may or may not be an option and
forget the new UDMA devices on a rescue IDE chain.  Unless you can get the
1024-cylinder boot partition magic done right, you have a nice, cheap,
boatanchor with new IDE devices on old IDE machines.

> Plus, if the disk goes bad, *replacing* it is cheaper.  I'd get better
> performance with SCSI, but I dont think I'm running into a disk
> bottleneck:
>
>   9:21pm  up 13 day(s), 18:18,  3 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.12, 0.21
>
> I could use more RAM, though... (anybody got U5/10 RAM for cheap?)
>
> Bill