SCSI or IDE Hard Drives?

[beley]

With the advancement of IDE hard drives lately is it really worth the extra $$ to pay for SCSI drives? Are they worth it?

It used to be that IDE drives failed much more than SCSI drives, and SCSI was faster, more reliable, etc. Lately there are more and more high speek IDE drives that are much larger than similarly priced SCSI versions.

So, is it worth it to get the SCSI? Are they only good for hardware RAID solutions or should they be used on every server?

Opinions welcome...

[DarktidesNET]

We use only SCSI for primary things. IDE is for backups only, simply because of their price and **** storage.

If you run many things that use constant file I/O (databases, etc) you'll see a big performance boost with SCSI over IDE.

Good day.

[Robert]

I think if the servers are for you or for you company, go with SCSI. However, if you are providing dedicated servers, use IDE to lower the cost as well as the repairs.

I guess it's a preference of choice.. just people prefer Intel.. others AMD. Some prefer PCs, others MAC. Some perfer IDE Hard Drives, others SCSI.

[beley]

Well, it's not debateable that SCSI used to be much faster than IDE... with 12,000 RPM scsi drives out several years ago. But I've seen 10,000 rpm IDE drives at 1/2 the price of comprable scsi drives... with very similar seek & transfer times. So if speed isn't the issue anymore, what is?

[DarktidesNET]

I've personally never seen an IDE drive beyond 10,000 rpm and it certainly wasn't very cheap ... it also was no where near the 3.x - 4.x seek times of SCSI.

[beley]

I have been looking for a 10,000 RPM IDE drive all morning and can't seem to find but one... although it's impressive its still priced a little high.

I can't remember the drive I saw that was 10K rpm IDE drive... but I'll see if I can find it again. For sure though, it seems IDE hasn't advanced quite as far as I thought...

[Ted S]

While I know IDE is certianly catching up to SCSI on RPM speed how does it work for you as a multi-read, stable drive? In the past I've had issues on IDE boxes with the drive failing after heavy load but given how many major sites now use IDE it seems things may be changing.... have you ever had an IDE drive die on you from overload?

[markblair]

Depends on the situation. SCSI is going to offer the faster solution but not everyone needs, or cares, about that. I prefer to have SCSI drives that I host websites with but every last drive in my PC and mini-network are IDE. It just made sense at the time.

[tranz]

What about Serial ATA drives?
They will soon overshadow SCSI drives in not only speed but in performance issues as well.

[varangian]

I've always used IDE and never had a problem but on my reseller box I use SCSI just in case. For our budget hosting solution, we use IDE. Just like for our budget solution we use Rackshack and for our resellers we use ThePlanet.com's colocation :)