Reply 480 of 1005, by libby
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I only use SCSI in older computers I value as part of my collection. the cards, cables and drives are dirt cheap and I have hundreds upon hundreds of each with access to even more. they were designed for server use and if they have low hours, will last decades more. they perform well, give you the sound and feel of spinning disks, and are fun to set up and optimize for. they have great driver support in legacy OSes. try CD booting a pentium 1 PC off an IDE CD-ROM sometime, too.
CF IDEs have their place, mostly in laptops for me as IDE laptop drives are generally slow and unreliable IME. but for desktop I just go all SCSI and never look back.
CFs give better access performance for small files, but get blown out by SCSI when transferring large files or doing multi-sector transfers or trying to do disk to disk transfers, I find. PIO IDE is almost unusable to me and even ATA33/66 stuff is generally too slow and poor in performance for my taste. the biggest advantage of SCSI is having its own controller chip with mature drivers that can do ISA or PCI bus mastering. CF's big advantage is being cooler, easier to set up and giving better performance random reading small chunks of data.