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"Henshall, Stuart - Design & Print" wrote: I was under the impression that part of the reason IDE disks where cheaper was that they tended to have higher bit densisty on similar media. Wouldn't this make them inherently less reliable? Or am I completly wrong here?
Not heard that one, generally technologies that do higher bit densities are less reliable, but more expensive, at least till they get the hang of making them. Certainly reading bits wrong is not something I've heard of as a problem with any modern disk drives, and they all have to handle problem blocks. I think that competition is the killer here, IDE market is fiercely competitive, where as at one point virtually all the SCSI disks in the world came out of a building near Singapore Changi airport (at least so the Singapore government claimed, but they tended to "emphasise" good news about Singapore). IDE got a bad performance name (deservedly so) before it started using DMA, which it never shed. Thus I was taught you can only have one request outstanding on an IDE bus - which was probably true once - but computing progresses at such a rate you have to learn to shed such old knowledge. Heck I was taught you had to tell IBM mainframes what block size to use, and that was no longer true when I was taught it (I was suspicious since the block sizes all related to IBM 3380 disks and the innards of the disk drives no longer consisted of a set of 8 removable platters, and a dust cover, so I read the manual!). SCSI disks tend to be better featured, but that isn't an inherent part of the technology, just what people were looking for in the kind of computer you put them in. A quick Google turned up this paper, makes the same sort of points. www.cs.virginia.edu/~bsw9d/papers/ide_scsi.pdf -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.