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Which does not contradict what I said: > Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses. Most motherboards only had two buses,
by throw0101a 5y ago
Which does not contradict what I said:
> Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses.
Most motherboards only had two buses, which each bus have two devices. Adding another card would allow another 2x2 drives.
Adding a SCSI card would have allowed for another seven devices (later fifteen). Most folks though didn't need that many at home.
- selimnairb 5y agoAlso, SCSI drives were more expensive (but usually performed better), so most stuck with IDE’s limitations.
- jandrese 5y agoSCSI stuff was way too expensive for poor college kids. Funnily enough ATAPI was just a slightly cut down version of SCSI run over ATA. There was little reason for the big SCSI price premium except that the vendors thought they could get more money out of businessmen and Mac users.
- throw0101a 5y agoSCSI drives were faster because higher RPM devices were available. 10 kRPM and 15 kRPM (!!!) SCSI drives were a thing, but I don't think there were many (any?) IDE drives that spun that fast. WD's 10 kRPM drive made quite the splash when it was announced, IIRC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor Whether a home user "needed" that kind of speed was quite another thing.
- brudgers 5y agoMost businesses didn't need those fast drives either. Marginal disk speed increase did not contributing to the bottom line. I mean if you're going to disk, you've already lost money.
- bbarnett 5y agoThere was also more queue depth, allowing scsi drives to better order reads. And hot swapping was very trouesome with IDE (not to be mistaken for newer eide), where as scsi was much better at hot swapping early on. SCSI also had more bandwith than ide, and scsi2 was around before I could get eide/dma5?(80 conductor) cables/drives. Man, memories.
- brudgers 5y agoIf there’s a contradiction it’s that it wasn’t bread versus cake. It was bread or nothing. IDE cards were under $10 at times. SCSI devices were made from unobtainium.
- mrighele 5y agoIt's also worth remembering that several sound card models used to have an extra IDE slot, although they generally supported CD-ROM drives and not hard disks.