On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, Ron Johnson wrote: > The thing is that, unlike SCSI, only one device can be using an > IDE bus at any one time.
a common misconception ... electrically ... only one ide disk can drive the signals on the ide cable at any time similarly, even scsi disks, only one disk can be driving the cable at any time == == if 2 scsi disks tries controlling the signals on the cables at == the same time, you'd have a major short circuit == ----------- ide disks controllers can pretend to support host swap but the device drivers does NOT support it scsi disks can do hot swap and is supported by scsi drivers ---------- ide specs allow for 18" max cable length at a specific impedence and resistance and operating environment scsi specs allow for 6'(?) max cable length at a specific impedence and resistance and opertating environment ---------- with ide .... you have 2 disk per cable with scsi ... you can have 15 or 32 disks per cable .. where all 15 disks have to share one cable and WAIT - hopefully, the disk controller has enough buffer to allow the cpu to merrily continue without waiting - good thing nobody makes a 32 connector scsi cable or a 255 connector firewire cable :-) disk driver ... in the old days ... ide disks had 2MB disk buffer but todays ide disks are also 8MB buffers in the old days ... scsi disks had 8MB disk buffer and hasn't changed in 8(?) yrs - in the old days, ide did not have tagged queing but in todays ide controllers, it too has tagged queuing depending on the motherboard chipset - scsi controllers always had tagged queing .. so the system can pretend the data was "really" written to the disks and merrily move along - in the old days ... ide disks rotated at 5400, 7200,10K and still have some catch up - in the old days ... scsi disks roated at 7200, 10K, 15K and runs "hot" - how fast can you write was a big deal in the old days 8MB/sec vs 16MB/sec 16MB/sec vs 40MB/sec 33MB/sec vs 80MB/sec 66MB/sec vs 120MB/sec 100MB/sec vs 160MB/sec 133MB/sec vs 320MB/sec ..sata.. vs iscsi ..iata.. vs what's-next transfer speeds ... ata-133 is supposed to be 133MB/sec but your real transfer speeds is highly dependent upon which motherboard and which chipset - ata give up chasing scsi and changes name to sata ultra-scsi-160 is supposed to be 160MB/sec ultra-scsi-320 is supposed to be 320MB/sec = since ide and scsi doesnt run at the same spec'd speeds, = one can only test for how close to the marketing numbers = it can achieve on the same mb/cpu/mem more fun ... c ya alvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]