kaled - 3:30 pm on Feb 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

Webmasters are often sci-fi fans. Now who was it that said "I cannay change the laws of physics." If you accept that data transfer rates are limited by the mechanical design (i.e. the ATA interface can squirt out data as fast as it comes off the disk platter) then the argument is largely dead. So, the question is this...

What is the sustained transfer rate of your SCSI drive? SCSI may be faster at transferring data out of into the drive's onboard cache, so, when writing data blocks up to the size of that cache, theoretically, there should be a performance gain (provided you don't want to access the disk again until the data has been written to the disk) but, in practice, this will not be noticeable. If you want to test this, in Windows, try disabling write-behind caching and run a few tests (not quite the same thing but near enough).

Clearly, Google don't feel that SCSI represents value for money. As for performance figures, do you also believe the speeds claimed by printer manufacturers?

Comparing SCSI and ATA is a bit like comparing Intel and AMD chips CPUs - Intel chips rarely achieve the figures claimed of them, but there are still people out there that believe they are faster.

Question
Why do manufacturers release their newest and fastest drives with SCSI interfaces (I assume they still do but I haven't checked)?
1) Because people believe SCSI means faster and will pay more.
2) To perpetuate the myth that SCSI really is faster (in order to achieve 1)).

Question
On the same motherboard, have any scsi-philes actually conducted realistic benchmark tests with identical ATA and SCSI drives? My guess is that Google have.

Kaled.