Why hasn't SCSI become popular?

[tomwaddle]

We see that SCSI is always putting out faster hard drives &, correct me if I'm wrong, can usually outperform IDE or SATA hard drives.

So, seeing the SCSI has been around for awhile, why hasn't the prices dropped thus allowing vendors to throw an onboard SCSI controller onto a MB? I figured that'd be a good idea since you could hook up a ton of hard drives and CD/DVD drives all on one cable.

 

[pip_seeker]

Same reason you don't buy steak and lobster at McD's.

It's the premium of the industry and will always cost more.

 

[apt403]

They cost more, they're bigger (Physical size) then normal drives, they're loud, the faster drives can't hold that much data, and most mobos don't have native SCSI support. Atleast the ones that are fast enough to warrrant using 'em over IDE or sata drives are anyway.

 

[jadeite]

The IDE vs SCSI wars demonstrate that lower cost wins. A SCSI controller adds a lot of cost versus IDE (integrated drive electronics) and its successor SATA. SCSI connectors and cables are also expensive components to add to a system.

The real question is why are the hard drive manufacturers not offering fast SATA drives? The fastest spin rate on SATA is 10K RPM and this is very rare (Raptor), meanwhile everyone seems to offer 15K RPM SCSI! There is no technical reason that SATA couldn't have 15K drives. Before you could have said you needed SCSI command queuing for ultra performance, but SATA has that. 15K drives would fly on SATA since each drive gets its own 3 gigabit channel versus SCSI which has a high total bandwidth, but it tends to be split and shared between multiple devices.

 

[choirbass]

The IDE vs SCSI wars demonstrate that lower cost wins. A SCSI controller adds a lot of cost versus IDE (integrated drive electronics) and its successor SATA. SCSI connectors and cables are also expensive components to add to a system.

The real question is why are the hard drive manufacturers not offering fast SATA drives? The fastest spin rate on SATA is 10K RPM and this is very rare (Raptor), meanwhile everyone seems to offer 15K RPM SCSI! There is no technical reason that SATA couldn't have 15K drives. Before you could have said you needed SCSI command queuing for ultra performance, but SATA has that. 15K drives would fly on SATA since each drive gets its own 3 gigabit channel versus SCSI which has a high total bandwidth, but it tends to be split and shared between multiple devices.

the main reason for lack of competition is server market protection, or has been till now anyways...

its the reason you havent seen any other companies other than western digital offering above 7.2k sata hdds... hitachi (or another company i believe) may be offering a 10k sata hdd somewhat soon too... havent heard much about it though other than the occasional rumor... at which point we 'may' see the performance of raptors jump yet again (as theyre currently limited to only 74GB platters, LMR, legacy molex connections for compatability, sata150, etc)... but, who knows... maybe PMR and sata300 (or other technologies) will be introduced with them sometime... with having larger platters (and caches even), there may actually be a need finally for anything more than sata150 then

 

[croc]

Physically, most SCSI drives are now 3.5" format these days. Logically they are smaller, 36 GB being typical, some go a bit larger. And an array of drives on a hot-swap backplane will start out in the thousands... Bare. Add dual, redundant controllers, FC connectors, and say a 64 drive enclosure fully populated.... Serious noise, serious money, and serious throughput. Check out the HP MSA1500 for instance... $13,000 starts getting a decent array.

Ok, I'm getting a MSA 1000, ~ 1 TB (mirrored, redundant with dual standby drives) and its value was about 10k AUD. I've got a NAS unit that is about 2500 AUD that is ~ 1.5 TB... Not quite as redundant, but one fourth the cost.

 

[apache_lives]

Arnt there 15,000 rpm sata drives for servers around??

for desktop pcs, there too noisy and dont offer faster loading times nor any other benifit for the cost so.