StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Years ago, I thought that SCSI would slowly take over the PC market because you can chain multiple drives together. They were always pretty expensive compared to the IDE drives of teh same size.

Doing some price checking for drives and noted that SCSI are still incredibly expensive compared to other formats. Now it appears that IDE is slowly being replaced by SATA.

Why did SCSI never pick up and why are they still so expensive?

SCSI never picked up because they were expensive. Sure, for servers they were popular, which is part of the reason why they're still more expensive.

I never figured SCSI for a home-user market. Price was an issue for sure, but there's also so many flavors of non-cross compatible SCSI that it takes a knowledgeable user to determine the right drives and cards and what will work with what.

As opposed to IDE where you can hook up an ATA133 HDD to a 66 or 100 controller with the only effect being that you will not utilize the full speed of the drive. It also offered questionable performance benefits for the home-user considering the lack of serious HDD use. SATA and IDE on the other hand are cheaper standards and easy to configure.

Driver support is also an issue as nothing is really standardized for SCSI. I've spent innumerable hours scouring the Internet trying to dig up drivers for older cards. Contrast that with IDE where driver support is built into pretty much every operating system.

What really got me was the lack of support for "SuperDisks." A drive that could use 120 MB optical floppies and was also backwards compatible with stadard 1.44 MB floppies. The price of the tech dropped fast, but no one but eMachines (ugh) adopted them. I would assume the main issue was the advent of USB flash cards and that the floppy drive was on it's way out the door anyways. Probably didn't help that the Superdisk drive required an IDE interface, but trying to transfer 120 MBs over a floppy cable would have been excruciating.

SCSI drives typically have a spin rate of 15,000rpm - twice as fast as most desktop hard drives. They're also engineered for greater reliability, and have longer warranties as a result. Unfortunately, that also makes them very expensive.

The main reason why SCSI never really took off was because drives significantly faster than 7200rpm are near-impossible to produce cheaply and reliably, and with those platter speeds there was no real advantage to SCSI over IDE (and later Serial ATA). In fact, given that it was harder to configure, SCSI was in fact much worse for end-users.

What really got me was the lack of support for "SuperDisks." A drive that could use 120 MB optical floppies and was also backwards compatible with stadard 1.44 MB floppies. The price of the tech dropped fast, but no one but eMachines (ugh) adopted them. I would assume the main issue was the advent of USB flash cards and that the floppy drive was on it's way out the door anyways. Probably didn't help that the Superdisk drive required an IDE interface, but trying to transfer 120 MBs over a floppy cable would have been excruciating.

It didn't help that most of the superfloppies (i.e. ZIP Disk, HiFD and SuperDisk) were horribly unreliable, but the main thing that killed them off was the CD-R. USB sticks didn't become popular until 2003/04, by which point HiFD and SuperDisk were long-dead, and ZIP had been relegated to a niche role.

SCSI drives typically have a spin rate of 15,000rpm - twice as fast as most desktop hard drives.

There are still quite a lot of SCSI drives that spin at "only" 10,000 RPM. Those 15K drives are for top-performance applications, which aren't warranted in every server. Further, there were also lots of 7200 RPM SCSI disks made up until at least a few years ago. I should know, I've found enough of them lying around at work pulled from old servers.

I think the bigger killer was that SCSI controllers (and drive electronics) have tended to be more complex and expensive than their IDE counterparts.

There's Serial Attached SCSI now, which is fairly popular in the server world and SATA drives can connect into SAS controllers (but not vice-versa).