[K12OSN] Just got approval - scsi or not

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 14:12, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:

> Les,
>  I think we have beat this subject to death a few months ago, but it seems
> that in the current discussion  one important fact got lost: scsi drives
> *do* last longer, and with a good reason. it is not construction nor
> workmanship - it is the intelligence of the embedded software. the one
> big difference is request queuing, which when done right and combined
> with predictive read ahead minimizes the head movments. the head movments
> are the culprit behind the need for recalibration and behind most of the
> mechanical failures (i remember reading somewhere the number 98%).
> julius

That might be true if the OS had no intelligence or buffering, but
in fact Linux has much bigger buffers and 'should' be much better
at rescheduling seeks into elevator order.  I say should because I
really have no idea if it does or not, but the unix systems I
used years ago did it and Linux is more than a match for them
in every other way.  I've had quite a few 3 year old SCSI drives
fail, but can't do a real comparison against ide in that respect
because I wouldn't have put ide in a server 3 years ago.  I now
have some 3ware ide raids but not old enough for any failures.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com