What is the differance between these two drives? (1 Viewer)

[Cameron_Peck]

This may not be the place to ask this but here goes. I was doing a search on pricewatch and found something that struck me funny.
This drive: http://www.7bytes.com/specs.cgi?FCST18GB+tmp/product is $30.28
And this drive:http://www.7bytes.com/specs.cgi?HDSCSISEA1+tmp/product is $184.42
They are both 18GB SCSI drives. The first one is fibre channel. What does that mean?

 

[Thom B]

Fibre channel is a connection interface. You'll note that the second drive lists "80pin" in the description which is the more conventional scsi interface.

 

[Camp]

So why are you thinking SCSI?

 

[Cameron_Peck]

I was not considering SCSI but when I saw a 18GB drive for $30 I became interested. I looked for a controller card and the cheapest one I could find was around $150. That kind of ruined it for me. I am trying to decide if it is worth the extra money to go with SATA. It costs more now but will I be glad I did it in a year or so?

 

[John_Berger]

I was not considering SCSI but when I saw a 18GB drive for $30 I became interested. I looked for a controller card and the cheapest one I could find was around $150.

SCSI is not cheap and never has been. Now that ATA/100 and ATA/133 are giving just about the same performace with respect to data transfer rates, it's difficult to justify using SCSI for home use.

Obviously, SCSI has many advantages, not the least of which are hot-swap abilities and being able to have dozens of drives on the same SCSI chain.

But from a straight cost perspective for the average user, SCSI is very difficult to justify in comparison to IDE.