"Appears in the Proceedings of the Second Usenix File and
Storage Technology Conference,
San Francisco, California, March 2003."
More than an interface - SCSI vs. ATA
Dave Anderson, Jim Dykes, Erik Riedel
Seagate Research
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
{dave.b.anderson,james.e.dykes,erik.riedel}@seagate.com
Abstract
This paper sets out to clear up a misconception prominent in the
storage community today, that SCSI disc drives and IDE (ATA) disc
drives are the same technology internally, and differ only in their
external interface and in their suggested retail price. The two
classes of drives represent two different product lines aimed at two
different markets. In fact, both classes contain a range of products
that address a variety of features and usage patterns beyond simply
the interface used to talk to the device. The target market and final
product specification are taken into account from the earliest design
decision through the manufacturing and testing process. This paper
attempts to clarify the differences by illuminating some of these
design choices and their consequences on final device
characteristics. This will hopefully allow the community to build
better storage systems with better knowledge of the trade-offs being
made and the performance characteristics that result.
Click here for the full paper in
pdf.