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Technology

Will Firewire be the death of SCSI? 123

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cables-and-bits dept.
cholko writes "Over on TechWeb there is a story about the use of Firewire in the new Macs. What makes the story interesting is the comment about the possibility of SCSI being dead within 2 years. Firewire will eventually supplant USB as well, but apparently IDE will be around a while in the mass storage market."
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Will Firewire be the death of SCSI? More

Will Firewire be the death of SCSI?

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  • I can sure see FireWire replacing external SCSI, but internal SCSI will still be around. FireWire won't be replacing internal SCSI anytime soon.
  • If anything, FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) will quickly replace things like Fiber Channel and the other wacko high-end drive mechanisms. Since Adaptec is one of the driving forces behind FW, I don't think that they want to see their bread-and-butter (SCSI cards and chips) go away anytime soon.

    The reason that USB isn't as big a hit as it should be is that only one PC OS has good support for it - Win98. Oh yea. That works. As part of some testing, I installed a pair of Labtec USB speakers in a Win98 system (no other sound card) and it worked perfectly, from the typical windows sounds to handling CD-Audio (it does CDDA from the CD-ROM to the speakers).

    So why doesn't Linux have USB support? Easy. Few USB devices to begin with, and nothing to compare the usage with. Given that Adaptec has opened up, and I'm sure Apple wants us Linux people to buy their stuff, you'll probably see more FW support coming out for Linux.
  • Huh? FireWire is supposed to hit 1.2GB soon. Last I heard (this was about 18 mos ago) the silicon was being made for 800Mhz.

  • Lets see now, scsi is up to 40 (80? 160?) megaBYTES a second. 40*8=240megabits. looks like 80megabyte scsi beats firewire already. Then we remember that 80megabyte scsi is still compatable with scsi-1 at 5 megabytes, and will be compatable with all faster scsi.

    I expect scsi to die, but it won't be because of firewire so much as because of fibre channel. (normally 1 gegaBIT, but up to 4 gegabits) And then it will only die because electrical engineers hate dealing with the fact that at these speeds a signal will arrive at the end of one wire faster then at the end of the next.

    I can't wait for IDE to die. It never should have been invented, scsi was always better. Okay, once in a while ATA/IDE had a faster therotial transfer rate, but scsi could come closer to its theoritical maximun.

  • Accually I do expect fibre channel to replace scsi. It already is, because all the big venders are commited to it. BTW, by big venders I don't mean the seagate's of the world. I mean the big RAID people, who would rather sell fibre channel then anything else. The server venders are coming around to because the fibre channel message has been preached enough.

    You can of course by most fibre channel products in scsi versions, and often SSA (IBM's thing) or escon (IBM again, but a little more open) but the venders want to move it all to fibre channel.

    Need I remind everyone that scsi is normally used in the big high end servers. Scsi is more expensive even when the parts are IDE with a different board because the customer is willing to pay for the feeling that it is more reliable. (lets not get into the scsi-ide arguement, but for these people scsi does have an advantage above reliability which may or may not exist)

    Note that I'm talking five years out though. Scsi will be sold for a long time yet, the best case perdictions say scsi will be around in the high end buiness for at least five years. I belive they are too optimistic, but that is why they are best case perdictions.

    I have no idea what firewire is, but I do know that there is no interest in the high end.

    BTW, in interest of disclosure, I will benifit if fibre channel makes it big. I also personally belive in fibre channel.

  • Huh? Who still uses that old 8 bit scsi stuff? Oh, you must be stuck in the low end consumer market, while I'm stuck in the high end market.

    Source: An in-depth introduction to scsi by David Demming. (I don't ahve my copy here, but I took a class tought by the author who is on the scsi committie) 80 megabytes/sec was achived in the real world over a year ago.

    And I'm smarting for my math mistake up there, that someone pointed out... :(

  • Go over 6 BUSY hosts, and ethernet drops to about 30mbits/sec due to colisions.

    Your switch arguements is irrelavent. Ethernet has nothing to do with switches, I could build a scsi switch if you gave me the money. It wouldn't make sense (due to the 16 device limit and the rarity of putting multipul hosts on scsi, but it can be done) Most computers are cabiable of acting as a router. Put a few scsi cards in several comptuers, and you can route ip. Hint, IP doesn't care what it is going over.

    Come to think of it, ethernet is a bus just like scsi. (except slower) Note that I agree that ip over scsi doesn't have much a point.

  • How long were CD-Rs out before they became popular? Or Minidisk? Or 3.5" floppies? Or mice for that matter.

    Just because it has been out for a while does not make it vaporware. It takes a while for somethings to take off...and others like DVD and DSS dishes take off like a rocket.

    Firewire is going to be the next standard connection for home theater too.
  • The new G3 Power Macs will go to the 400 Mbit/sec.
    And they don't require extra hardware. For some of those thumpin' throughput SCSI cards don't you need two of the cards? Are they hot-plugable? I don't think so. Do they support 63 devices? I don't think so.

    Now I think I remeber seeing them share a camcorder with two computers and a hard disk with two computers at MacWorld...I know you can't do that with SCSI.
  • Anymore than Fibrechannel replaced SCSI. SCSI is a protocol as much as an electrical specification. What you will see is Firewire being the communications protocol SCSI is run over (except for the high end, where FibreChannel and Storage Area Networks will still rule).

    Firewire is not going to replace USB. USB is cheaper than Firewire by quite a bit. For low-bandwidth devices (like keyboards and mice) it's not worth it- save the $20.

    Firewire may replace PCI. I don't think so, but it may. The next revision of Firewire will be spec'd to 1.6Gbit/sec ~= 160MByte/sec for 33MHz 32bit PCI. PCI, however, has already been Spec'ed up to 64 bit and 66Mhz, giving 400MB/sec performance. What I'm betting will happen is that 64bit 66MHz PCI will become the standard for "high speed, no hotswap" peripherals like video, and for tying together multiple Firewire buses. Firewire (running SCSI among other things) will become the standard for "medium speed, hotswappable" peripherals like hard disks. USB will become the standard for "low speed, ultra low cost" peripherals like keyboards and mice.
  • All the SCSI standards nowadays are annoying as shit. Not to mention termination, adapters, mixed cables and connectors... Bah. Good riddance. Of course I love SCSI over IDE - but I'll take some FireWire.
  • One reason to have a universal bus is convenience with single connectors, protocols, etc.

    Not like a keyboard, speaker, mouse or even a modem would even put a dent that bandwidth.

  • Yeah, exactly... Hot plug and play is nice. RAID I think would still be a manufacturer option though, no?
  • Firewire on PC's not too alive. Intel's not supporting it in their chipsets, so you need a peripheral which ain't too likely for most boxes (sub-1000$ is growing) Indeed, Adaptec jumped on the Firewire bandwagon, and is hurting because of it.

    IDE's future is (unfortunately) rosy: PC 99 (I think, might be prior to that) requires an IDE interface on the computer EVEN IF it's got a SCSI one. This basically means most computers will just have IDE (sub-$1000 trend: minimize extras).

  • Check out the ZD coverage of Steves address, very interesting stuff. Steve explains it well.

    USB 12 Mbits per sec 127 devices
    Firewire 400 Mbits per sec 63 devices (COOL!!!!)

    The Mac's has two of each ! damm


    This looks great to me. If we let Intel dole out technology in small increments.

  • My Seagate 18gb 7200 rpm disks move 15mb/sec to/from the media. 3 of these drives running at full throttle can completely soak out my measily 40mB/sec (320mbit/sec) ultrawide SCSI. Even if 400mbit/sec firewire was available right now, it still wouldn't be much of an improvement.

    Firewire's going to be great for scanners, digital cameras, and the like, but if you have a big stack of large capacity 10,000rpm disks connected to your server, you want ultra2wide SCSI 80mB/sec (640mbit/sec), not 400mbit/sec firewire.

  • People assuming USB will be absorbed by Firewire are missing a few
    points about the whole purpose of USB. Its designed to be a cheap and
    flexible connector for low bandwidth devices, most especially devices
    that aren't expected to have an increase in bandwidth demands over
    time, and eliminate all other connectors in that area.

    Keyboards have not significantly expanded their bandwidth demands over
    time. Likewise mice, game controllers and so on. You might make a case
    for speakers, microphones and suchlike, but even then there's a law of
    diminishing returns.

    Firewire is aimed at the category of devices that like to use all the
    bandwidth available, and show benefits from said approach, like hard
    drives, video feed equipment and such.

    Sure, you could stick a keyboard on a Firewire line but what's the
    point? The connector is likely to be more expensive and now you have
    to worry about your hard disk slowing down your typing speed. And
    given that the demands of technology will eventually force someone to
    design a whole new connector better than Firewire, you have to go and
    redesign your keyboards as well.

    Connectors last until there's a real need to replace them. If USB is
    good enough as a connector, it can last next to forever. People who
    manufacture USB devices won't move off USB until its clear that their
    devices are going to benefit from it or they can't continue as they
    have in the past.

    USB is getting established because there are limitations to serial,
    parallel and a list of other ports. USB can do things they can't and
    its a single standard they can all adhere to. Manufacturers and
    consumers will like having a single ubiquitous standard and won't move
    off of it until they have to.

    In the case of Firewire, people are likely to keep demanding bigger
    pipes for all those high-bandwidth devices they plug into their
    machines, especially for those running servers. That will guarentee
    that someday Firewire will be replaced by something with a greater
    capacity than Firewire will ever have.

    So Firewire attacks SCSI which attacked IDE, and someday some new
    connector is going to come out with pipes so huge that people who want
    their I/O to scream are going to instantly switch over to this new
    Firewire successor.

    Granted, the swapover will be painful, but people needing those
    devices and that speed are likely to make the investment in a new
    connector technology for the gains that it will bring. To swap off of
    USB would require similar gains and given USB's niche, that ain't
    likely to happen.

    Odds are we'll see a USB-2, possible with some superior data
    transmission protocols, but it won't be accepted unless its backwards
    compatible (or there's a simple adaptor plug available). But the
    evolution of USB given its modest target is going to be very slow.

    In short, Firewire is going to attack SCSI which is attacking IDE, but
    USB is going after serial, parallel, and the like. The two are going
    after whole different breeds of periphial and so are not in direct
    competition with each other.

  • Firewire will never kill SCSI because there are some things that SCSI does better. Current SCSI interface speeds are higher, and the SCSI protocol is much more intelligent than the serial Firewire protocol. I mean, sure, you can connect 63 hard drives to one Firewire port, but what would your CPU usage look like? A major advantage of SCSI is that I/O is intelligently handled by a dedicated processor.

    Technical merits aside, the currently installed base alone is enough to keep SCSI going for more than two years. Don't hold your breath waiting for Firewire RAID.

  • You claim that once the Firewire interface gets faster than magnetic media, SCSI has no further advantages over FireWire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    SCSI is unsurpassed in dealing with multiple peripherals on one bus because of the intelligence of the SCSI protocol and controller cards. If you fill a FireWire line to the max with devices, the CPU will run out of cycles to service them all. By contrast, if you fill a SCSI bus to the max, all your devices hum along smoothly because the SCSI card manages everything well.

    I agree that FireWire has some incredible advantages which will help it dominate the consumer market. However, SCSI will survive in the high end, not just (as you say) the very high end. Many servers require the intelligent I/O handling that SCSI provides. It's not just the NSA that needs SCSI.

    Off topic points:

    • SCSI development will certainly continue, and you're right, it does have a considerable head start.
    • Mixing fast and slow SCSI devices in general doesn't hurt anything in the least. The only type of mixing that does hurt performance is mixing Ultra2 (LVD) devices with slower devices.
  • Swanson predicted that FireWire could supplant SCSI but that IDE would survive. Let's ignore the SCSI bit (which has been thrashed to death already) and focus on the IDE bit. I don't see any conceivable way that SCSI could die while IDE survives.

    Many people have put forth passionate arguments explaining just how much better FireWire is than SCSI. These same arguments are just as damning against IDE, if not more so. Combined with the fact that FireWire is targeted at the "low-end" consumer market (which is the only market that uses IDE), it seems absolutely incredible to me that consumer markets would reject SCSI on grounds of being inferior to FireWire, while still accepting IDE.

    I admit that IDE has a rather large installed base. However, at least one person here has argued that the size of the SCSI installed base is no defense against FireWire. Turning that argument around, I posit (for the same reasons) that the size of the IDE installed base will not prevent IDE from being supplanted by FireWire.

    I hope that my remarks have convinced some people that at least one of Swanson's statements is wrong.

  • As some have put forward, SCSI's still got an edge on things on the high-end. Only things that could put a real crimp in SCSI are Fibre Channel and IEEE-1355.

    For those who don't know what IEEE-1355 is, it's a high-speed switched networking system that is derived from the Transputer's parallel processing link system. Baseline spec is capable of ~300Mbps with the high end being in the 1-3Gbps range. The parts cost for the basline adapter is about the cost of an RS-232 port, and the switches are on a par with the USB hub in complexity and cost.


    The snag? These devices are still in their infancy- there's not a lot of the low end stuff out there and the high-end units are engineering prototypes that were built to make high performance clustering possible.
  • Firewire sounds so fast because of the way they quote the transfer speeds. Since Firewire is a serial protocol, they use Mega Bits per second. And since SCSI is a parallel bus, SCSI speeds are quoted in Mega Bytes per second.

    Currently available SCSI:
    -----------------------------------------------
    SCSI-1 : 5 MBytes/sec : 40 Mbits/sec
    SCSI-2 : 10 MBytes/sec : 80 Mbits/sec
    SCSI-2 Wide : 20 MBytes/sec : 160 Mbits/sec
    Ultra Wide : 40 MBytes/sec : 320 Mbits/sec
    Ultra2 Wide : 80 MBytes/sec : 640 Mbits/sec

    SCSI next year:
    -----------------------------------------------
    Ultra3 Wide : 160 MBytes/sec : 1280 Mbits/sec


    Currently available FireWire:
    -----------------------------------------------
    Standard : 12.5 MBytes/sec: 100 Mbits/sec
    High Perf. : 25 MBytes/sec : 200 Mbits/sec

    FireWire next year:
    -----------------------------------------------
    Higher Perf. : 50 MBytes/sec : 400 Mbits/sec

    FireWire some day:
    -----------------------------------------------
    Ultra Perf. : 150 MBytes/sec : 1200 Mbits/sec


    So there you can see that the numbers being thrown around regarding FireWires blazing speed can be a little misleading. Today's SCSI drives are much faster than today's FireWire, and will continue to be so in the future. Any time a high performance server is being built, SCSI will remain the storage interface of choice for the forseeable future.

    Now if all you want to do is hook up that nifty new camcorder or color scanner to your PC or Mac, FireWire is definitely the way to go.

    Regards.
  • According to the Seagate spec sheet [seagate.com] (insert grain of salt here), the Cheetah drives can deliver data to the bus at speeds of 14.5 to 21.3 MBytes per second, approximately 116 to 170 MBits per second. In a server environment where you have eight or ten drives chugging away on one bus, servicing requests from hundreds of different users, the excess bus speed gets used up in a hurry. And it doesn't have to be a 'crazy' RAID 5 setup, either. Any heavily used server with more than one drive will benefit from the bus speed being higher than the drives' speed.

    And of course, a single drive can't pump data through a slow FireWire bus any faster than it can a fast SCSI bus. ;^)

  • Most high-end SCSI controllers sport two or three independent busses, each of which can control up to 15 devices. You can add as many adapters as your PC can handle (slots/IRQs/DMA etc). And yes, the drives can be hot pluggable for a price. And yes, I'll pit my server with 30 Ultra2 SCSI drives against your Mac with 63 FireWire drives any day of the week. Assuming you or I had either one. ;^)

    Regards.

  • Change SCSI speed references to MBits/sec instead of MBytes/sec. Then we wouldn't hear so much about FireWire's "blazing" speeds.

    Who would want crummy old 400Mbps FireWire when you can get 640Mbps Ultra2 SCSI? It's marketing, man. Perception is everything.

    Regards.


  • How good could Firewire be if it allows hooking [techweb.com] a crappy IDE drive to it?

    If it works--great! SCSI drives are too expensive. My 2.1Gig UW still costs about the same now as when I bought it two years ago. It's better if everyone buys what I buy. No need to be that rebelious.

    But what I don't understand is why SCSI is being bypassed (yet again). It's going to be a while before Firewire get up to SCSI speeds. Why not just concentrate on SCSI?

  • Weird, but it's the best reasoning I've heard.

    Chris

  • Except that SCSI is still faster (by far) than Firewire. If anything, it seems that Firewire will attack IDE, and Fibre Channel will attack SCSI.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Lucent demo 800Mbit/s Firewire in Comdex. 1600Mbit/s version is comming RSN. With DTV comming, there is no other choice.


    A href=
    "http://www.lucent.com/micro/NEWS/111098a.html">
    http://www.lucent.com/micro/NEWS/111098a.html


  • I seriously doubt that firewire will replace scsi in servers within 2 years. Server designs usually take a bit longer than desktops to use "trendy" features. Perhaps support for firewire will be introduced in addition to scsi over the next few years. I know firewire has been around for sometime now, and I'd sure like to try it out. But I don't see scsi disappearing.

  • Well, one acronym, actually: HIPPI [lanl.gov].

    Anyone have HIPPI devices on their PC? How about at work? Not very common, huh? Assuming SCSI survives and continues to evolve, it'll be the HIPPI of the next century, IMO. Here's what I base that on:

    • FireWire will dominate the consumer market. I think it's pretty clear that FireWire will easily take over in the consumer market--all things (like OS support, M$ not seeing it as a threat to some facet of their business, etc.) being equal, of course. Consumers will eat up the tiny, simple cables, the hot-swapping, the single connector, the large device limits, the lack of IDs and termination, and so on. They don't want or need the highest of high-end speeds. Add to this the presence of FireWire in other consumer markets like DV and possibly audio equipment and it's a sure bet to appear on every home PC eventually.
    • FireWire will probably dominate all but the very highest of the high-end. FireWire is "slow" now, but this is the very first generation of products. Did anyone doom SCSI to be stuck at the speed of SCSI-1 back when it was introduced? It stands to reason that FireWire will evolve just like SCSI did. Assuming SCSI development continues in some capacity after FireWire takes the consumer market, it may stay ahead of FireWire given its head-start in speed. But eventually SCSI is going to meet the same fate as any fast parallel interface (i.e. HIPPI), drowning in giant, expensive cables with very limited room to grow because of the basic design spec (device limits, termination, etc.). Maybe the NSA will use UltraMegaWideFast SCSI-7 in 2010, but you won't find a connector on the back of your Compaq from CompUSA. By that time, FireWire will probably be faster than the very fastest spinning magnetic media, and it'll be even more ubiquitous than SCSI is now (due to its penetration in the consumer audio/video market).
    • SCSI's installed base only delays the inevitable, it doesn't prevent it. People and companies with big bucks invested in SCSI devices will continue to use them until they're forced to upgrade, but individuals will trade up even faster. I know I'm never buying another SCSI device again, and I own a handful of hard drives, removables, and even a CD-R I bought just a few months ago. And, like most individuals who own SCSI equipment, my drives are mostly older, slower devices, not fast, giant RAIDs or even single 10,000 rpm units. So even if I *wanted* to stick with SCSI, I'd have to have at least two interfaces on my computer: an older SCSI card for my slow devices, and a faster UltraSCSI card or somesuch for the fast drive(s), because mixing fast and slow devices on the same SCSI bus slows everything down (whoops, there's another advantage of FireWire: fast devices are not impaired by slow devices on the same bus).

    Like any transition, it'll take time. Just look at how long it took for ISA to disappear! SCSI will march on in some form, but FireWire is clearly the future of the vast majority of the market (i.e. home and "normal" business users). It's my hope that the coming generations of the FireWire spec will surpass SCSI so even the high-end will get the benefits of serial interface simplicity. Now, about that analog video connector... ;-)

  • The self-sufficiency of SCSI device chains is nice, but far outweighed by FireWire's other advantages for all but a very small portion of users. And as IDE has shown, new, fast CPUs combined with the evolution of a device interface helps to make even the biggest "CPU hog" interfaces "good enough" for most purposes (and FireWire is not nearly as bad as IDE was/is).

    For big servers and the like, I'd imagine that several higher-end serial interfaces with advantages similar to FireWire's would better serve the market if you could magically flip a switch and replace the investment in SCSI, but those markets change slowly, and there's no clear leader yet, as far as I can tell. The needs are so different, though, that it's taken considerable evolution for SCSI to venture to both the low- (standard on Mac motherboards, cheap PC SCSI cards) and high-end (giant RAIDs). FireWire is clearly a better fit for the low-end. The question is, how long will SCSI be the best fit for the high end?

    It's my understanding that the SCSI mixed fast/slow device issue applies to some degree in all setups (i.e. "only when both devices are using the bus," etc.), but it was at the front of my mind since I've been playing with Mac G3 configs and it ocurred to me that if I got an Ultra2 card for both the internal drive and my "legacy" slow SCSI devices, I'd be handicapping the fast internal drive. The alternative seems to be an el-cheapo $50 SCSI-2 card (which is still plenty fast for my old 1GB drives, Zip, CD-R, etc.) and ATA for the internal. In that light, "slow" FireWire looks mighty attractive for future external device expansion. It'd be great if other PC makers could "herd their users" towards newer standards (SCSI, even!) the way Apple can with its total control of the hardware and software (which Slashdot readers just love, right? ;-) Ah well, different markets...
  • SCSI is way overpriced and it is just waiting for something to topple it.

    SCSI comes at a high price mainly because most people buy IDE shit - and of course that results in a vicious circle.

    BTW UltraDMA is doing just that, easing the burden on the CPU,

    DMA IDE interfaces have been around for a while - that's why there's the "Ultra" in UltraDMA to indicate that it's a faster DMA mode.

    This happens for really one specific reason - it is CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP.

    It's not as simple as that. IDE was introduced as a backwards-compatible replacement for ST506-type controllers, offering better performance at around the same price. The original IDE interfaces were simply buffered interfaces to a subset of the ISA bus. IDE drives emulate the registers of an ST506-type controller, but with an extended command set. This means that no changes to BIOS or OS code were needed to support IDE drives initially.

    All the backwards-compatibility hacks that are involved in today's drives makes them pretty complex and should make them more expensive than SCSI drives. However, that compatibility allowed IDE to sweep the PC market in the early 1990s and meant they could be produced in huge quantities, and hence more cheaply than SCSI drives.

    Since IDE took over the low end of the market, most SCSI drives are high-end products with additional features over IDE. This increases the price differential further.

  • Alot of you asutely point out that SCSI can be faster than firewire. But can you hot plug SCSI? Is the "wire" thin and flexible? Do you need to worry about termination, and IDs with firewire? Is the SCSI connector designed for 8 year old boys ( game boy? ). Firewire will an awesome way to connect things besides diskdrives. Digital cameras? ALL DV camcorders have 'em. Scanners? Please broaden your though processes just a bit.
  • Well, some of us can, but you sure can't.

    40*8=240megabits

    Really? I get 320.

  • Apple's not the first to make firewire a standard interface. Sony's VAIO computers (portables and towers) have firewire on board too.

    Does anyone know anything about it though? For example, is the iLink on the Sony portables going to support Castlewood's orb? Or is it some kind of special Sony version?
  • scsi will die and ide will live on?
    are we living in an insane world?
  • If Firewire gets as cheap as they say it will, they will compliment each other.

    Firewire on the low end, Parallel SCSI in the mid range, and Fibre Channel on the high end.

    The best part is all three interfaces use the same protocol. The same SCSI midlayer and higher level drivers can be used for all three. You just need to write the low level driver for your particular interface card.
  • Fibre Channel isn't parallel. It's serial in both its copper and fiber implemetations.

    It's just a lot faster than firewire.

  • As I under stand it, Fibre channel is the parallel version of Firewire. Also, Fibre Channel can be fiber optics, which boosts speeds as well.
  • SCSI is way overpriced and it is just waiting for something to topple it. Sure it will be around for a while just like ISA Bus, but it is on its way out, just like the ISA Bus. BTW UltraDMA is doing just that, easing the burden on the CPU, and this trend will continue in the future: IDE will get faster and more independent. This happens for really one specific reason - it is CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP.
  • SCSI sucks because people building servers expect to pay big bucks for storage. THAT is why SCSI prices are still WAY above IDE, not because spindle RPMS are higher, or manufacturing costs higher or anything else. The manufacturers KNOW they can charge high prices for there $hit because people will pay for it. Of course prices have gone down since the beginning of SCSI, but they are not really scale for the performance increases compared to other computing technologies.
  • I was directly responding to the previous poster by saying that

    1. IDE will not be gone that soon because it is just so darn cheap.

    2. SCSI is so expensive only because people are willing to pay for it.

    3. SCSI is just waiting for competition

    4. SCSI will then fade out like ISA

    5. I have a free clue for him (and you) because he had one for everybody else

    Maybe you should pay a little more attention befor wasting your time with diatribes that really miss what the discussion was about.
  • I didn't say SCSI didn't have it's merits. On the contrary, it certainly does. I am talking about pure pricing scales.
  • AS far as i see it SCSI is not going to go away in 2 years. Ya sure its a little more expencive (actualy a lot), but people going for shear speed and no overhead will shurely stick with SCSI. in fact im going to buy a new SCSI drive today.

    however for external use that would be great, not everone has a SCSI controler for you to bring your HD over and copy some data. then again not everone has firewire. If they implement it on all the MainBoards going out in the near future then i can see it becoming a trend. I have a laptop with a 10/100 NIC in it for my portibal needs. This sounds like USB to me, its hasnt taken over my serial devices yet, nothing beats my 8$ mouse, and is thier even a USB ISDN device made?

    P.S. yaya i know my spelling sux
  • If you think IEEE-1394 connections is going to replace SCSI, I kind of doubt it.

    Ever heard of this thing called Fibre Channel?? It's a super-high-speed interface that makes Ultra-Wide SCSI seem slow in comparison. With the price of Fibre Channel devices starting to fall, I expect within a few years the average server will have Fibre Channel connections for the hard drives at least.
  • I think the reference to Firewire supplanting SCSI is in the area of new installations. With higher throughput and supposedly less cost there is an opportunity.

    USB got screwed over because everyone waited on Mickeysoft to release software to use it. Basically think of it as being announced for primetime too early.

    Apparently Jobs has made Apple brave again, going to new technologies quicker than the stumbling Wintel monopoly. If they can get some manufacturers behind Firewire (it seems they have a few) maybe this will help bring SCSI down to a reasonable level, instead of the price-fixed level its at now. (there cannot be much real price difference between IDE and SCSI drives as in one brand I know for sure the only difference is the circut board attached to the physical drive - yet the price of the drive is 200 bucks more)

    ..
  • Methinks that comparing Firewire to Fibre Channel is a bit like comparing Windows and Unix, or modems and ATM. Both have their area of speciality.

    I work with high-end enterprise digital asset management systems - unix servers (generally Sun X500s) with RAID online storage(often A5000s) and HP MO jukeboxes providing near-line storage (up to the 1200ex, which stores 1.2 terabytes).

    Sun's A5000s are FCAL devices and until something better than FCAL comes along, I'm not switching. From what I've seen, Firewire isn't better; it's just had good PR.

    Anyway, everyone seems to have forgotten that both Fibre Channel and IEEE P1394 are part of the SCSI-3 standard. :)

    Dodger
  • We have a pile of Fibre Channel connected disk right here where I work. The product is the Sun A5000 arrays. At a relatively low level the fibre channel is some special high speed bus. But when you install the drivers in Solaris the fibre channel connected disk is presented to the operating system as a pile of SCSI controllers, targets and disks. It seems to me that regardless of the fact that the underlying bus is fibre channel, fire wire or smoke signals atleast one layer of abstraction is going to be SCSI.

  • The first SCSI drive whose purchase I was involved in cost something like $400 for 20MB. A couple of years later I was buying 200MB for $350. Just a couple of weeks ago I was able to get 4.2GB UW disks for under $250. (Of course, I still pay nearly a grand for a 4GB StorageWorks disk; I guess that little plastic module costs quite a bit to manufacture)

    How is SCSI not getting cheaper? There are advantages to SCSI that the people who buy IDE apparently don't need to take of advantage of (performance in multitasking environments, etc.). If you're going to need lots of disk space, IMHO, SCSI is the only way to go unless you want to keep replacing your four IDE disks with larger and larger sized drives (and somehow dealing with the risk of having more and more data on a single point of failure^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspindle).

    I do wish controllers would come down in price. I'd much rather use a few fewer drives on a controller and use multiple controllers to balance I/O and having multiple controllers is The Only Way To Go (tm) for drive mirroring.

  • Will SCSI ever achieve 80MByte/sec? You seem to be quoting speeds from something that doesn't exist yet.

    More importantly, SCSI still has that 7-device limit. That is where FireWire really scores over SCSI.

    --

  • Agree that Device Bay is probably key to Firewire's success. (Those who don't know, Device Bay is a spec which would allow drives to be universally snapped in, hot, with no cables, screws, jumpers, etc.)

    I thought 1394 has a standard plug so that we won't have go go through the connector hell that is SCSI. (At least 5 external plugs by my count.)

  • Keep saying it, but you might be dead wrong.

    Sony has plans to make Firewire a univeral interconnect for stereo systems. Just replace that ratsnest of RCA plugs and digital interconnects with one firewire chain. Sounds like a good idea to me.

    (Agreed that a Firewire keyboard will probably not see the light of day, tho.)

  • Since any nine year old can connect gameboys together, and presumably not bend the pins or gunk up the cables, I don't see how this is a bad thing!

    Especially when compared to the expensive hell of different SCSI cable specs, connectors, and terminators.
  • hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
    Yeah Apple is full of bright ideas lately... firewire is sooo great! that's why they didnt put it on the imac. death of SCSI? I dont think so..
    EIDE versus SCSI.... lemme see... IDE sucks, SCSI rules. IDE is slow, SCSI is lightning fast. IDE is a limited bus that is prone to problems, SCSI is unlimited and is self correcting. IDE forces the computer to do all the work, SCSI takes the load off the processor. I see firewire and usb dying.. SCSI will live forever unless intel morons try to kill it.

    Another reason why we all dont have mac's instead of Intel based computers.. Apple cant make a good decision to save their lives.

  • DUH! (Score:1)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 )
    people making servers are charging extra for scsi.. simple solution... MAKE YOUR OWN SERVER!
    a server is no more complex than a desktop, any IS person worth the paper bag they were shipped in can do it. (Unless they are MSCE then they dont know what SCSI is or what a bios chip looks like) DELL servers are crap, for the same price an IS department can build out of premium components twice the machine, instead of the second hand crap that dell sells.

  • DUH? (Score:1)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 )
    What an intilligent decision! Squeeze data through a serial protocol! good for toys like tape backup or joysticks.. as for HDD's.. let's get a 64bit wide scsi bus. and add more processors to the hardware so we dont waste cpu cycles doing the work that the prephrials are supposed to do! the scsi card had to do all the data work it's self, the HDD's have to deal with their own crap on theri own and leave my CPU cycles alone! If hardware manufacturers would get their heads out of their butts we wouldnt need 9950Mhz computers with 100 processors to run our software because the dang hardware requires complex drivers. USB is a joke. Firewire had potential. EIDE is for the poor and wretched. Gimmie SCSI Ultra Wide! and prephrials that are computers on their own!

    BTW, I proved this point to my friends last week, a 586 p100 running quake II quite nicely.. All prephrials, video, hdd,sound,etc.. were of the self processing type.

    BAN any hardware that requires software to run them!!! (other than simple drivers)

  • If you put enough devices in parallel, you can get darn close to 80MB/sec. I setup a system recently with 6 10,000RPM drives in parallel that had a sustained transfer rate of very close to 80MB/sec. Granted, the individual devices won't do much over 20MB/sec but when you run them in parallel with a good controller you can do amazing things.

    At the time, I was doing a test of running SCSI Ultra2 head to head against Fibre Channel. It ended up being a very close race which made it quite hard to justify the expense of Fibre Channel.

  • Actually, there already is a project to get USB running on Linux. They already have support for some devices. Sorry, but I wasn't able to dig up the URL.

  • Man, it must hurt to die as many times as SCSI has been reputed to...

    SCSI will be with us for a long time. Fine by me... it's mature, stable, and plenty quick for 9/10 of the things that need to be done with storage. I'm all for Firewire and crew, but I just don't see the need to rip out my SCSI installed base yet. It does what I need it to do.

  • You all are missing a large part of the reason firewire is so great. If you would have watched the demo at macworld on ZDTV (someone posted the link on here somewhere) you would see that you can chain computers together with devices.

    For instance, lets say I have a scanner, I can hook that scanner to computer1, then hook computer1 to computer2, computer2 to computer3, and on down the line, and ALL the computers can share that scanner as if it was locally attached to each one.

    The same can be done with a hard drive, the computers will think it is local.

    I can have an external hard drive at the office, bring it home and hotplug it into my home computer and it will spin up WITHOUT a power adapter and show up on my screen in a few seconds.

    I think that firewire can give up to 60watts of power, so you don't have to worry about plugging most of your devices in.

  • Well I don't know much about Fibre Channel so, correct me if I'm wrong, it is much more expensive than FW, SCSI, and Ethernet. Maybe this will be a viable alternative in the future when it is cheaper, but right now it isn't.

    As for ethernet, I'm not aware of any scanners, hard drives, digital cameras, or any common peripherals beside printers that have ethernet ports built into them.

  • I can see as firewire grows the price on SCSI will drop in order to keep up competition. Looking forward to 10GB Ultra SCSI 3 HD for $300.
    If the SCSI drive is that cheap, why wouldn't the firewire drive be the same price, or nearly the same? After all, it's the same drive, just with a slightly different controller on it.

    I expect that the drive manufacturers don't give a damn whether they sell firewire or SCSI drives.

    On the other hand, I think you're right about controllers. If an NCR 53C875 controller goes for Cdn$115 these days, there's no reason Adaptec should be charging Cdn$250 for their card.

    cjs

  • SCSI use to be horribly expensive. It's a lot more reasonable now (I can remember not too long ago SCSI cards costing $500). There used to also be a significant premium for SCSI disks; that's gone, as you can find general parity in pricing for EIDE and SCSI disks (although some places insist on charing more). Used SCSI equipment is often cheaper than comparable IDE equipment.

    If FireWire be a better technology, then I do hope it will take over SCSI. However, it needs to be free of choking patents and the specifications need to be very open if we ever want to use it with an opensource operating system.

    ``I belive OS/2 is destined to be the greatest operating system, and possibly program, of all time.''--Bill "The Visionary" Gates, 1988 (Microsoft Press)
  • You're telling me. Adaptec UWs have been stable in price for a long time (hovering at around $160 +/- $10 for OEM). If firewire can kill scsi device prices, I think we'll see more people turning to scsi as not only a viable storage option, but also an inexpensive storage option.
  • one application which needs arrays of big
    drives with big bandwidth is uncompressed
    video editing/effects (which, coincidentally,
    happens to be the bread and butter of the
    company i work for). for example, real-time
    uncompressed video requires about 30MB/sec
    (or 240Mb/sec).

    however, for a simple real-time dissolve
    (2 read streams and one write), triple it
    to 90MB/sec, and you're beyond what a
    single UWSCSI channel will do.

    real-time film-res playback
    (2Kx1.5Kx48bits colour) is about 340MB/sec.

    i'm sure there are other applications, such
    as serving many streams of high-quality audio
    or video over high-bandwidth net connections
    which require striped drive arrays connected
    over multiple SCSI channels as well.
  • I think people need to realize that there is MUCH more to the computer industry than than the consumer market. YES, FireWire is a nice alternative to SCSI for a large number of devices. And yes, I'll be one of the first people to note that SCSI has many many issues, and will be phased out eventually.
    But, let me be the one to tell you right now that the industry has absolutely NO interest in making hard-drives for the FireWire architecture. It is GREAT for digital cameras and high bandwidth applications, but is NOT tested in hard-disk storage to the extent of SCSI and FibreChannel.
    FibreChannel was conceived to be the replacement to SCSI, and the industry has placed too much time and money into its conception to abandon it so readily, as some suggest. So, as it would be nice to have one standard interface for all computer devices, I seriously doubt it will be FireWire, but, rather something yet to be conceived.

    Thanks for your time
    John Ehn
    Ehn Consulting
  • "FireWire" is a buzz-word amongst the posters on this forum but they fail to see that it is nothing but a physical transport for protocols just like Ethernet is for network protocols.

    The currently approved SCSI standard (SCSI-3) is currently capabable of using four different physical transports including the old parallell interface and FireWire IEEE-1394.
    Check out the T10 homepage for further information.

    http://www.symbios.com/x3t10/scsi-3.htm

    --
    Mattias Sandgren
    Umeå, Sweden
  • >>Your average drive is probably no faster than 15MB/sec at best. This is true of both IDE and SCSI drive

    Dude, first of all, I don't know many drives that are _really_ capable of sustaining 15MB/sec long enough to really call it a 15MB/sec drive. A Micropolis Stinger Ultra Wide SCSI @ 5400 RPM's gets around 7.8MB/sec on large files(adaptec SCSI bench). 33MB/sec on UDMA is the burst rate. How often is this achieved? Not often. My old Seagate 1220a EIDE drive (rated at 13.3 MB/sec burst) rarely got more than 900KB/sec under normal conditions.

    >>80MB/sec. Who needs that much bandwidth when the drives are only capable of 15MB/sec?

    Because with SCSI, the bus can handle _simultaneous_ I/O to and from the devices. This adds up when you have 2 hard drives, a cd-RW. cdrom and zip all on the same bus.

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