June 2002
Beginner to intermediate
816 pages
32h 59m
English
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
ATA Versus SCSI
Relative to ATA, SCSI has the following advantages:
- Performance
ATA drives simply cannot compare to SCSI drives in performance under load. In our real-world testing, the slowest SCSI drives we used were faster than the fastest ATA drives, particularly under Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux, and other multitasking operating systems. This held true across the board, even when we tested an elderly, midrange Seagate SCSI drive against the fastest of the current ATA drives. Although ATA may match SCSI under light load, when disk activity starts to climb SCSI is simply faster. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
Tip
To verify our impression of SCSI versus ATA, we did an experiment. Barbara’s main workstation uses a 7,200 RPM SCSI Seagate Barracuda drive. We built an identical system, but substituted a 7,200 RPM Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drive. For normal operations, performance of the two PCs was indistinguishable.
We then started an XCOPY operation that streamed gigabytes of data comprising hundreds of directories and thousands of files from a third system across our 100BaseT network to the hard drive of the ATA system. While that data was being copied, the ATA system was nearly unusable. Loading Word from the hard drive took literally a full minute, and opening a large document took even longer.
We then repeated the experiment, but this time to Barbara’s SCSI Barracuda. The drive banged away, certainly, but we were able to load programs and run things normally with very little ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.