Dumb Terminals - One PC

[lewmur]

Well -- having handled quite a few scsi disks in the day when I worked for a living -- the typical big difference is in average access time. Sustained throughput of sectors all in a row is not particularly faster than on an ide disk. But a server disk's work is commonly to seek somewhere on a disk and get one or two sectors, then seek somewhere else and get two sectors, then on to the next request. Scsi disks win the race on servers because they are built to seek quickly. To implement that they run at 10,000 rpm [some at 15k] and have husky actuators to jerk the heads back and forth -- and so they tend to run very hot and use a lot of power. Scsi disks also commonly implement what is called 'elevator seeks' -- meaning they'll stop at the nearest destination sector that is in their queue rather than seek all the way to [say] some distant destination first and then come back. At the end of the hour more data will have been moved that way, even if some client seeks took longer than they would have with ide-style seeking. The average home pc would not see much benefit from scsi disks, IMO.

While this is all true, it is irrelevant to the present discussion. Temmu claimed that SCSI disks gave an advantage to networking vs NC's multi-user approach and that is simply not true. In this case, we're not talking abour "the average home computer" but, rather, a business computer serving mulitple users simultaneously.