Once upon a time, I loved SCSI. (Was: Help! Is this kernel or hardwareproblem?)

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

/* Begin interface blathering*/

c. 1990, SCSI, to me, was a Good Thing.  You took your AHA-1542B card,
plugged in your stuff, and It Just Worked.  There were, hell, no more than
two or three different types of SCSI back then (SCSI-1, the funky Exabyte
(Andataco?) four-quadrillion-pin-highly-proprietary thang, and Mac's
25-pin-looks-like-a-serial-connector bit).  It was fast.  It had great
MTBF.  It interfaced (sorry, I verbed!) to everything: CD-ROMs, tape
drives, hard disks... heck, I even had a SCSI floppy!  On top of all that,
disk size was a non-issue (vs., say, MFM, RLL, ESDI and IDE, all of which
had "issues").  [Side note: God, I hated ESDI.]

Then it just got weird.  You had SCSI-1, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, wide, LVD,
active, passive, blah, blah, blah.  And ALL the damn cables cost $100/ft. 
And terminators!  Oh, I love terminators.  Otherwise known as
the-things-that-stick-out-the-back-of-your-machine-to-get-snapped-off-when-you-try-moving-stuff.

Which still didn't make me like IDE any more.  It was "simplicity
through stupidity."

And then came SATA.  Or, more specifically, SATA II.  SATA II has done
some nifty stuff.  It's cherry-picked some of the best features of SCSI,
while leveraging (damn verbing...) IDE's dominance on the desktop.  I
still dislike the connectors -- they just don't *click* into place like I
imagine they should -- but I have to say, routing SATA to 16 drives in a
cramped chassis beats either IDE or SCSI hands-down.  [Yeah, there's also
fibre-channel.  It's nifty.  It's also pricey as hell, and was never aimed
at the home or even small/mid-sized business.]

So, anyway, I'm a SATA guy, now.  One channel -- one drive.  No ID's to
set, no terminators to worry about, hot-swappable... and there are some
really fast, high-MTBF drives out there for those who want to compete with
SCSI.  As to reliability, there are some plenty good RAID solutions
available.  The 3Ware 9500 series *screams*.

$.02, YMMV, yadda-yadda...

-Ken

/* EOB */