Re: Serial ATA: SCSI Replacement?

PeteCresswell wrote:
SCSI seems to have gone away for home users... and I donated all my old
SCSI cables, cards, and a drive or two to the trash a couple weeks ago.

But it raised a question for me.

Seems like one of SCSI's claims to fame was unloading the work of disc
access from the CPU to the SCSI controller.

Not really.. The CPU usage of SCSI was sometimes slightly lower, but there's not been a huge difference since DMA became commonplace on IDE/ATA almost 10 years ago.

In server-type use the better command queueing ability of SCSI made some performance difference (NCQ does essentially the same thing on SATA). Most of the performance advantage of SCSI drives had nothing to do with the interface at all - the drives were usually higher spindle RPM and faster in themselves.

Given that SCSI is then and Serial ATA is now; does Serial ATA fulfill
that function?

Well, yes, but that is nothing special. The replacement for SCSI is actually going to be SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which is a superset of SATA and supports some additional features.

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Robert Han*** Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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