Why are SCSI CDRW's slower than EIDE???

[RamonGTP]

I just bought a YAMAHA 20/10/40 EIDE CDRW, and I went to www.plextor.com to look at their drives for comparison. What I noticed is that their SCSI drives were slower than their EIDE ones. What gives? I always thought it was the other way around???

-Ramon

[NDC]

Actually, neither of the inteface have any difference in write speeds. 1X=150KB whether it's SCSI or EIDE. The only difference between the two would be the fact that SCSI CDRW drives rely on the SCSI controller to perform the task Vs. EIDE which relys on the CPU.

[RamonGTP]

Right, I know that much... But SCSI is suppose to be a faster interface than IDE from what I know... But the fastest SCSI I saw there was 16x while the fastest EIDE I saw was 24x.

-Ramon

[otheos]

It appears Plextor is dropping SCSI in favor of IDE. The larger market base of IDE is believed to have lured many manufacturers away from SCSI and into IDE/ATAPI.

Then again CD-R/RW as a storage medium has some limitations that make it unpopular to the main SCSI based uses (workstations/servers).
As a backup medium it is limited to only 700MB, that eventhough are great for home users, nobody in the IT industry has any use for such little spce. As such, it is very unlikely that a coorp will be in need of the latest and fastest burner, since it will only be used in a limited manner. For this, you need robust construction and tested technology. And so SCSI is left at 12x speeds (Plextor). It's fast enough, has SCSI interface to connect to the WS/Server boxes, and will cause no trouble (see managment/ admin support) and will burn trouble free with low coaster rate.

The fastest SCSI burner today is the Yamaha 2100 (16x P-CAV). Yamaha has also released the 2200 with a SCSI adaptor, so if that counts (which I don't see why not), is the fastest (20x P-CAV).

It is unlikely that Plextor might use the Z-CLV technology on a SCSI burner as it is a bit "touchy" on media and there are still discussion about data integrity as a result of the necessary zone gaps. All these will only add fragility to a SCSI solution, somthing that beats the purpose of going SCSI in the first place.

Finaly with many traditional workstations today being based on IDE buses (Linux PC's, Sun boxes etc) and the low cost of ATAPI burners, users can have their ws equiped with a burner, (unlike the old days when the burner was somewhere in the SCSI chain of the server).

This obviously hurts traditional SCSI users such as myself ( ) but we'll live with slower drives just fine!

[RamonGTP]

otheos, I just purchased the Yamaha 2200... Where can I get this SCSI adapter? All my IDE busses are full now, and I still have an extra hard drive laying around that i'd like to hook up.

Thanks,
-Ramon

[otheos]

The adapter is designed specifically for the 2200 and will not work with any other IDE device (as the firmware needs to be prepared for it).

If you need it for the 2200, I will dissapoint you because Yamaha is only bundling it with the 2200S-VK model and does not! sell it separetly. If you are desperate for it, you can convience a buddy of yours to buy the "SCSI" 2200 burner, you pay the difference over the IDE and keep the adapter.