[TriLUG] SCSI vs. ATA article

[Jay Barrett]

Jeremy,

In my simple mind Seagate's marketing team is grasping for straws to justify
the higher cost, hence higher price for SCSI.  The fact of the matter is
that SCSI is predominantly used in servers and high-end workstation and
these users are use to paying a premium.  Their primary objective is to slow
down the migration to lower margin products.  Scary to think that the MTBF
for ALL drives is about 10 years now, but I would recommend replacing them
when you cycle your systems.

With serial ATA now available (loosely used term) on the market and serial
SCSI on the horizon it will be interesting to see if they continue with the
same story line.

I use both ATA and SCSI drives in my systems and servers, but have been
moving towards ATA with 3Ware controllers.  Now I'm looking forward towards
2.5" 10K serial ATA drives and being able to fit about 30 of them in a
single 2U chassis. Given the fact that they use less power the give off less
heat thus total reliability will be higher thus I can keep my mp3 files
on-line longer (sorry just had to add that).

BTW I'm not knocking Seagate just their ruse, I actually prefer Seagate and
IBM drives to the other folks.  My 2 cents worth.

Jay