dan@wind.bellcore.com (Daniel Strick) (10/02/89)
I think it is more correct to say that SMD is in its "Golden Years". SMD performance has probably reached its limit, but this is a recent event and further refinements (new controller designs) are still possible (if not economically exciting). Many SMD controllers are now "mature" products (you can buy one with reasonable assurance that it will work correctly on your workstation and with almost any SMD drive and will give expected performance (though it is important to know what you are doing when you try to configure a strange drive). SCSI performance will probably surpass SMD performance in a few years, but SMD still holds an edge because the SCSI protocols are expensive, because SCSI devices tend to be designed for the low end PC type systems (are cheaply contstructed), and because current microcomputer systems are mostly not designed to take full advantage of SCSI distributed smarts and parallel data transfer. New versions of SCSI and modern SCSI interface chips will make SCSI faster (eventually). IPI-2 will probably start out a little bit faster than SMD, partly due to the wider bus, but mainly because the new IPI-2 controllers are designed with faster processors (simply because they are newer). I expect IPI-2 to become much faster than SMD, but IPI-2 is also not quite here yet. SMD is still king. (but you know what happens to kings these days) Dan Strick, Bellcore, dan@bellcore.com, bellcore!dan, (201)829-4624