From: Henning Brauer (lists-openbsdbsws.de)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 10:32:05 CDT

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On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 08:02:13AM -0500, Marco Peereboom wrote:
> IDE is CPU intensive, unlike SCSI which does pretty much everything on it's
> own and just lets the OS know when it is done.

this isn't true any more.

and for the speed: current fast IDE disks have higher continous data
transfer rates than the current fastest SCSI disks.
However, the latter usually have much much lower random access times,
which becomes as more important as there are more concurrent uses.

for example, on a mailserver, and here especially the mail queue, lots
of small files are written and read again, all the time. the data
ytransfer rate here is pretty much irrelevant as the files are small,
but the access time is important.

in most cases ATA vs SCSI doesn't make much of a difference any more.
that doesn't mean that there aren't cases where SCSI is absolutely
desireable.

last not least SCSI drives are usually build for 24x7 operation and
ATA/IDe ones aren't, what is for example seen in the specified MTBFs -
where SCSI disks usually are about a factor of 2..4 better.

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