Firewire vs. SCSI

[t048]

Which interface is better for harddrives?

[otheos]

erm... SCSI.

[DanU]

Firewire is great for portable devices. The cable is easier to handle and the connector is much smaller than SCSI. But firewire is currently limited to 50 MBytes/s while the fastest SCSI devices use a 160 Mbytes/s interface. Still... 50Mbytes/s is a respectable speed.

What are your intended uses for the interface? Is this for your main hard drive or do you want to use it for a portable HD or CDRW?

[otheos]

let's not forget that SCSI is a protocol more than an interface. Even Ultra SCSI (20MB/s) that is seemingly slower that Firewire is better for a hard disk. Actually Firewire and SCSI are hardly competing technologies, since they were designed and built for completely different uses. The fact that some devices are available in either, should not force us to only compare in terms of pure bandwidth! Error correction, resource overheads, system integration, just to mention a few, are things to consider before choosing. Depending on the use you chose. If you need an external storage interface, I would suggest SCSI.

[t048]

I was thinking of a regular internal hard drive.

[otheos]

Your motherboard should have dual IDE interface to connect up to 4 devices (hard drives and/or CDROMs). Why don't you use it?
IDE hard drives are very cheap, and you can get excellent performance (not to mention performance/price ratio) by getting a 7200rpm 2MB cache HD. Latest solution (with as many GBs as possible per platter) are faster.

SCSI hard drives are much more expensive and you also need a SCSI card controler (expensive). SCSI shines in multitasking environments (servers, workstation). For home use, their price/performance ration is very poor and eventhough I am a SCSI fan myself I would not recomend it unless your needs specifically demand it.

I would defenetly recomend SCSI for optical devices though (CDROMs, CDR/RW).

[radbasa]

Otheos is right, buying PC hardware is not about buying the most technically impressive parts available. It all depends on what you're going to use it for. I've seen too many GeForce equipped PCs destined for an office where the most strenous video output they'll encounter is scrolling through a spreadsheet.

[DanU]

The guy is trying to sell you something you absolutely don't need. If I were you, I'd go to another shop. This guy sounds like he only wants your money.

[t048]

I don't need SCSI. The guy where I bought my motherboard just suggested that it would run best with a SCSI drive. Also, during the boot, it keeps looking for a SCSI drive, which is what made me wonder about it. Thanks for your input.

[radbasa]

There's a boot option in advanced settings of your bios. Usually there's 3 or 4 of them, options like FLOPPY, IDE-0, IDE-1, CDROM, SCSI. Just turn it off (disabled) or set it to IDE. He probably put SCSI as the first bootup sequence option. He's using it to fool people into thinking that SCSI boots the PC faster.

Hate it when PC salesmen turn into car salesmen