Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uunet!sdrc!thor!scjones
From: scjones@thor.UUCP (Larry Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Why are SCSI drives so cheap?
Message-ID: <149@thor.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 90 14:04:28 GMT
References: <2247@sud509.ed.ray.com> <481.26db8352@sunset.sedd.trw.com>
Organization: SDRC, Cincinnati
Lines: 19

In article <481.26db8352@sunset.sedd.trw.com>, rose@sunset.sedd.trw.com writes:
> 
> Also, why are SCSI drives so much cheaper (at least some are)?  There's an
> 84 MB with kit for less than $400.

Primarily because having the controller right on the drive allows you
to get away with things you could never get away with when the low
level signals from the drive have to travel across a foot of ribbon
cable in an electrically noisy environment.  The Seagate 296N (which
I presume is the drive you are referring to) is the same disk as the
251-1 (which is a 42Mb MFM drive) -- since the controller is so close
to the drive they can reliably use an RLL encoding to double the number
of sectors per track.
----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!thor!scjones
SDRC                                      scjones@thor.UUCP
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I've got PLENTY of common sense!  I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin