ATA vs. SCSI pointers

Jim Whitehead (ejw@cloud.ICS.uci.edu)
Thu, 03 Sep 1998 12:16:39 -0700


I've been doing some research today prior to buying a computer which
will be used for remote Web page authoring, specifically looking at
the question of which kind of drive controller, ATA or SCSI, should be
on the computer.

During this research, I've found a few interesting FAQs:

Enhanced IDE/Fast-ATA FAQ

http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/pcinfo/hardware/atafaq/atafq.htm

A very detailed source of information on the IDE/ATA interface,
including lots of useful tidbits on how to determine what interface
version is on your system, pointers to useful utilities,
troubleshooting advice, etc. In fact, the only thing I fault this
FAQ for is not having a good comparison to SCSI.

SCSI FAQ:

http://www.dtpdirect.com/tips/tips/scsi/comp1.html
http://www.dtpdirect.com/tips/tips/scsi/comp2.html

A bit dated (it proudly mentions that Amigas use SCSI), but still a
good trove of SCSI information.

About SCSI and IDE:

http://www.hardwaregroup.org/faq/scsi_about.htm

A concise compare/contrast of ATA (IDE) vs. SCSI, which examines the
issue of 1 vs. more than one hard disk, and the relative importance of
the controller technology vs. the basic capabilities of the hard disk.

- Jim