I read that many of you guys use SCSI in their 386's, 486's.
But why? Is there such a big difference between regular IDE and SCSI? Some claim that it doesn't free up so much CPU, and that they are actually quite noisy. So, what is the main advantage to SCSI over IDE?
Many factors exist. Some Hard Drives are mechanically completely identical when it comes to both IDE and SCSI, the only difference is the connection method.
Early IDE and SCSI also differ.
For example my SCSI Drive is very silent and runs on FastSCSI 10MB/s.
Some SCSI are more faster and have greater speeds and are much more louder.
You can read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI
One of my reasons is that it was quite expensive back in the days and not everyone could afford it, so for me it is all about having something I didn't back in the 90s.
Extra benefits of increased speed and lower CPU load is great. SCSI controllers often allow bigger sized harddrives compared to contemporary IDE controllers.
wrote:One of my reasons is that it was quite expensive back in the days and not everyone could afford it, so for me it is all about having something I didn't back in the 90s.
Extra benefits of increased speed and lower CPU load is great. SCSI controllers often allow bigger sized harddrives compared to contemporary IDE controllers.
Is that speed increase noticeable in DOS, or only Windows?
I've recently been looking at the SCSI option as well and have asked the same question. from what i've found seems in early systems SCSI hard drives are a little quicker. also don't forget you can chain more devices where IDE is limited to 2. so with an SCSI card you can have your internal CD-rom drive and HDD and then an external connector for whatever other scsi devices you want to add. apperently some rare SCSI cards even had cache ram onboard. and yhea there is the SCSI lets you get around the old 540MB BIOS limit.
after the recent research i've been doing i'm probibly going to add a nice VLB SCSI card to my 486.
I don't like that SCSI harddrives were noisier. At least, that's got me worried about older SCSI drives.
wrote:I don't like that SCSI harddrives were noisier. At least, that's got me worried about older SCSI drives.
Depends on the drive. My IBM 9GB SCSI drive is less noisy than many of my IDE drives.
I also use scsi for my oldest computers: XT- 286 (maybe 386, and 486)
SCSI is far away the easiest thing to implement. If you want a good harddisk for a XT computer, that i wouldnt very easy to go for a MFM or RLL drive.. Those havent much space, if they die they arent easy to replace. And they making a lot more noise than SCSI drives. SCSI driver have a higher MTFB rate, so they will live longer.. And they doesnt fail that hard and you can easy add other device to it.
~ At least it can do black and white~
