[KLUG Members] Re: New machine - Linux hardware?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> Agree 100%

USB is piss-poor slow, only upto 12Mbps (1.5MBps).  Although USB 2.0
is promising 480Mbps (60MBps), it is just trying to add bandwidth to
an already inefficient standard that prefers PIO and high CPU
utilization for transfers and has a bare-boned command set that
cause inter-vendor device issues on the same bus.  Vendors are
already having issues achieving even close to the aforementioned
device performance with such a poor bus design.  Even Intel has had
issue with putting a good USB 2.0 implementation in the southbridge,
without overloading it to the point of reduced performance.

As such, SCSI is not that expensive -- with [new] PCI cards starting
at $20 (e.g., TekRam DC-315U), external enclosures from <<$50, and
numerous, unused drives for <$100.  Of course, SCSI is not as
ubiquitous as USB, and has some cabling issues (I currently have an
"universal external SCSI cabling kit" that has a
miniDB50-to-miniDB50 with 5 "adapters" to accomodate this ;-).

Personally, I hope IEEE1394 Firewire continues to gain ground
despite Intel's lack of putting it in the southbridge (which they
have been promising to do since 1997 and the PIIX4 southbridge of
the i440LX/BX/GX).  Firewire offers the simplicity of cabling, like
USB unlike SCSI, a full command set with true vendor-independence,
like SCSI but unlike USB/ATA, a native DMA implementation, like
UltraATA/SCSI but unlike USB, and high throughput, currently
100-800Mbps, 400Mbps typical (that's 12.5-100MBps, 50MBps typical). 
There is even a 400Mbps (50MBps) Firewire to 33MBps UltraDMA bridge
that allows manufacturers to make UltraATA devices external Firewire
ones (like the Maxtor products).

AMD/ViA have already pleged to include it in future southbridge
chips.  I suspect the next ViA 696/786 will have it.

> Avoid anything that mentions TR, Traven, QIC, etc....

QIC sux for longevity.  And the media cost is rediculous!

> Of course you can always string ethernet to the neighbors
> and backup to a hard drive in another building... :)

You'd be surprised how "cheap" 1000Base-SX fiber Gigabit is nowdays,
and it can go ~1,000 feet.  The cards are ~$250, the switches are
<$1,000 now (for two, duplex ports, which include a dozen or so
10/100 ports), and the cabling is about $3/foot.

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   chat:thebs413
SmithConcepts, Inc.           http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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