on mon NUMBER sep NUMBER stephen d williams wrote it s efficient end not low end at NUMBERmillion hour mtbf NUMBERmb sec and pretty good buffering and speed the only thing going for scsi is NUMBER NUMBER rpm vs NUMBER and in a very small number of cases slightly better scatter gather actually i think there might be a NUMBER NUMBER rpm ide now it s not just krpm the desktop hds have a higher failure rate but i agree eide has high density and eide hardware raid can offer scsi a sound beating for reliability performance and storage density rack units for the money if designed for it and if people would actually start buying it the other issues are pretty much non issues using multiple drives and controller contention just use many ide channels with extra pci cards up to NUMBER in some systems and long cable runs just split there are not all that many hard drives inside an NUMBERu enclosure airflow blockage you have to fit in NUMBER NUMBERx the number of scsi disks with eide will soon be a thing of the past due to sata storage between nodes dual port scsi is also a non issue since it is very expensive doesn t work that well in practice because there are numerous secondary failure modes for shared disk systems and because you still end up with a single point of failure since rack space costs dominate and our systems need more or less decent i o we re going with NUMBERu dells with scsi the hard drive prices don t really make a visible difference given the cost of the iron and the rackspace month plus NUMBERu dells don t have any space left for lots of eide drives 