IDE vs SCSI

I have continued to search the various review sites, and although there are more and more articles aout RAIDing IDE drives, no one touches on the subject of whether the physical IDE hard drives are can withstand the same kind of sustained "hits" as their SCSI counterparts.

When you look at total cost of ownership (TCO), this is a very important factor. Where is the cost savings if I need to replace drives every month. Is there anyone out there who understands the differences between the physical construction of the drives?

scsi is made for servers....
ide is good for normal people, but if you are setting up a database server or something, where it is going to be accessed a lot...not sure if ide can take that, but they are getting better, and ide raid is very fast...and reliable...as long as you have good drives, and good a good controller...
i dont know about the physical differences in the drives, but i would assume that scsi is able to deal more with large access ammounts...but then again, newer ide drives have matured, and probably have become more able to deal with those sorts of situations...but i am not an expert in this area...so someone else might be able to give you more info.

-DAvid

-Live, Learn, then build your own computer!-

I'm planning on setting up a home server in a few months. Mostly to mess around with, but I'll probably host a small website and ftp from it. I don't expect too many people to access it, so would I be ok with IDE drives? I hope so, because when i searched for SCSI drives, they were very expensive.

i think that you should be fine....what internet connection do you have, because if it is anything above cable or dsl, then you might be getting into scsi territory when it comes to a server...
but if you are just going to let your friends and family access the thing, then you should be fine.
i think that ide is very fast now, and very stable.
if you get a raid 0 setup...then you should be running a very fast and reliable server.
i myself am going to make a file server, set up in my closet, but this will only be a storage device for my hiome network...
i am trying to find some REALLY cheap hard drives that i can throw in there, and use for storage...
they dont even have to be fast, because this thing will only be used for some minor backing up, and storing mp3s....
i would actually prefer them to be like 5400 rpm because that way, heat dissipation inside the closet would not be an issue....
that is another thing...
ide runs at lower rpms than scsi....which makes them better for home users who dont want to have active cooling running, creating massive ammounts of decibles under their desk.
scsi is very expensive...but you are paying for a faster, more reliable (saying this in respect to the fact that large servers use a scsi setup) drive than an ide drive.
so if it is just a small server, then ide will be adequate...but if you decide to expand it, look into scsi...you will be happier when there are immense ammounts of traffic accessing the drive.

-DAvid

-Live, Learn, then build your own computer!-

I'm running off a university connection which is really fast. I'm only hosting files for several friends, and wouldn't expect for than a few people here and there to access my site if I made it. So I'm guessing IDE will be good enough for me.

most likely..
the thing is, i would check with the college to see if they are going to be able to allow you to do that...
my friend got in trouble for that, and almost lost her connection to the internet...
they sometimes dont like people running servers on their connection, but since you are only allowing a few people to access it, then they might be ok with it...
but before you open it up, i would check it out.

-DAvid

-Live, Learn, then build your own computer!-

If I understand the history of storage systems, RAIDing SCSI came about in order to take advantage of the relatively cheaper SCSI Drives. RAIDing IDE drives using IDE controllers with built in processors and dedicated channels to each IDE drive really creates a compelling solution in theory for even high end solutions. Think about how quickly IDE drives are evolving in comparison to SCSI drives. Two key issues that I think need further understanding are:
1. The use of IDE drives in high transaction environments from a physical wear and tear point of view and,
2. Using a IDE JBOD for clustering, I think this is were the SCSI command set has an advantage. Alternatively, a RAIDed Gigabit Ethernet IDE based NAS can become the shared Storage file system in a network environment as an alternative to very expensive SAN configurations.

I would like to see a review site address at least item 1 along with the articles they publish on IDE RAID.

One more follow-up note, I noticed while reading the posts on the Cuda IV drives the Seagate engineer mentioned that the ATA cuda is the same drive as the SCSI Cuda, only a different interface. The SCSI cuda is advertised for Enterprise data use.

i have used ide drive in servers using Mega Raid ide 100 by American Megatrends they are great for customers who want raid 0 or 1 and don,t want to pay for scsi
<A HREF="http://www.ami.com/" target="_new">http://www.ami.com/&lt;/A>

good point.

-DAvid

-Live, Learn, then build your own computer!-