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From: mcia@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Mike Ciaraldi)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: ESDI vs. SCSI for 486 Disks?
Keywords: ESDI SCSI Disk Controller
Message-ID: <9678@ur-cc.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 90 01:48:29 GMT
Sender: mcia@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
Organization: University of Rochester, Rochester NY
Lines: 24

I'm helping someone configure a multi-user Unix system. We're looking
at a 486 running at 33 MHz, with 16 Megabytes RAM and 16 serial ports.
It will be used to run accounting software.

We want to put on about 400 Megabytes of disk, but I'm trying to 
decide what is the best interface. My first thought was to use an
intelligent disk controller (such as the one made by DPT),
containing 256 kilobytes of cache, connected to the disk drive by ESDI.
I figured the disk caching would speed up access to the programs
and data files, by keeping sectors recently read from the disk and
even pre-fetching sectors.

On the other hand, I keep hearing that SCSI is a superior interface.
But does the faster data-transfer rate compensate for the lack
of caching? Or are there SCSI drives that include caching?

Does anyone have any comments on making this choice, or experience
in this sort of setup? There does not seem to be much of a cost
difference, so I am looking for the choice that will give the
best performance.

You can post back to this newsgroup, or reply to me at:

ciaraldi@uhura.cc.rochester.edu