In toasters@mathworks.com, you wrote:
Having one IDE bus per drive, would eliminates the minor cost advantage that IDE drives have over SCSI drives.
Probably not, opening my trade mag at the first ad I come to the prices are:
8.5G seagate UDMA IDE drive £84 9G Quantum UW SCSI drive £235 Promise ultra33 2 channel ide controller £20
So say we went for the a minimum 3 devices with expansion to 4 we would need 2 promise cards (each card has 2 channels on which we put only 1 drive each) and 3 IDE drives. Total cost <£300. With a scsi system you would be looking at £700 before you added in a scsi controller.
With regard to performance the lower overhead of IDE actually makes them faster in many cases, especially if as here you only use one device per bus. At the high end you have to go scsi/fibre etc, the biggest boards I've seen have had 20 pci slots, split over a number of seperate busses. That effectively limits you to 40 drives. Driving x pci busses and y cards each with z drives on will also get pretty icky.
Chris