Which is faster, an Ultra-ATA/66 drive or an Ultra Wide SCSI drive?
Ultra Wide SCSI drives have a reputation for being the fastest. And it costs you at least $650 for an Ultra Wide PCI controller board with one 18 Gig Ultra Wide drive (see MacGurus). A comparable ATA/66 controller and ATA/66 drive will cost you about $300. Is the SCSI worth twice the cost? Let’s find out: LONGER BAR is FASTER. RED BAR IS FASTEST. Conclusion A single Ultra-Wide SCSI drive on an Ultra Wide controller is no faster than a single Ultra-ATA/66 drive on an Ultra-ATA/66 controller. Is the SCSI worth twice the cost? I don’t think so. Comments Now don’t email me that the test was unfair. The SCSI drive was a 9 gig 10,000 rpm Cheetah while both ATA/66 drives were 20 gig 7200 rpm models. Test drives are hard to come by. I’ll try to match the drives more closely in future testing which will include dual drives in a RAID array (both interfaces). Test Configurations & Procedures • All three drives were tested on a G4/400 Sawtooth with 256MB of RAM. Disk cache was set to 512K to purpo
