[FireBeyond]

Not really the same thing, but your story reminded me of a long forgotten story.

I remember being in a computer store, and this woman was being told she should buy a 2x SCSI CDR, rather than the 8x IDE one she'd been eyeing (plus controller and cables, etc., of course), "Because SCSI is a much better interface and performs better so the two-speed drive will be faster than the eight".

I couldn't let that go, waited til the sales guy stopped buzzing, and told her the truth of the matter, and showed the specs... 300KB/s versus 1200KB/s has nothing to do with the interface. Yeah, the bus or whatever might be more performant (and do its own controlling, versus offloading), but immaterial.

[hakfoo]

At the time that was relevant, wasn't SCSI specifically preferred for recording because IDE was particularly vulnerable when you had Windows 9x's mediocre multitasking and tiny buffers? I know there was very much a window of "close every other piece of software while burning".

An 8x SCSI drive would be preferrable to an 8x IDE drive, but he was obviously trying to sell what thought he could unload with that half-truth.

I know even long after IDE was mainstreamed, cost-no-object builds (think Boot/Maximum PC's annual Dream Machine) would have SCSI for reasons like that.

[mdip]

Oh man, you're bringing back memories.

I know I went with SCSI, originally, because I had actually purchased two drives -- the huge one, and another one that was a bit faster but smaller and something had led me to believe that SCSI lent itself better to that configuration. I can't remember, specifically, what though.

I recall with CD-ROM drives -- earlier ones -- it was similar. Actually, in a few ways it was worse because the earliest CD-ROM drives came as SCSI or "Parallel Port to SCSI" which I'm not sure anyone ever got to work completely right.

But ... and I could just Google it but I'm being lazy ... I recall it had something to do with Bus Disconnection and Native Command Queuing in SCSI that allowed the CD-ROM drive and the HDD to operate without waiting on one another (as much?).

I know SCSI drives basically disappeared once IDE drives became common. You didn't see SCSI controllers often outside of servers, ever, in the PC world except for a brief period when that was the most common CD-ROM drive.