On Sunday 15 August 2004 08:12 pm, Brian Kelsay wrote:

> And jhutchins, you can't hot-swap IDE as far as I know.  You risk
> a total system failure and are likely to burn up a motherboard or a
> drive.  Only SCSI does hot-swap.

Not true.  Hot-swap capability DOES have to be built into the interface, and 
you'll fry a non-HS SCSI system just as bad as an IDE drive if it's not meant 
for it, as most on-motherboard SCSI systems are not.  

One of the things you need is something that makes a very clean connection of 
all the pins at reasonably close to the same time.

It may be a little tougher to hot-swap IDE drives due to their initialization 
sequence, but I have seen systems that had that capability.

SCSI just isn't the big mystical super hardware everybody keeps trying to sell 
it for.  Sure it'll do great things - at very high prices, things other 
hardware standards can match at similar price points.  

More over-priced, over-hyped high-end stuff tends to be SCSI, but that's got a 
lot more to do with marketing than any imagined superior technology.

(Which reminds me of SysAdmin magazine giving a great review to a rack-mount 
keyboard and flat panel display - that cost over $4,000.  Some peopel are 
stupid about money.)