ATA/EIDE versus SCSI – which is better?

The answer: neither is better — each has certain advantages and disadvantages.SCSI drives today can run at 10,000 RPM, so the highest performance SCSI models (and therefore the most expensive models) have the best seek performance. As noted above, seek performance is very important when doing lots of tracks/edits on one disk drive. SCSI also has the advantage of being used internally as well as externally. Internal mounting is great if you don’t need to move drives between systems (and it may result in a quieter disk drive), but putting more disks into the CPU increases the power and heat-dissipation demands on the chassis. SCSI drives are also more “expandable” since you can put up to 15 different disk drives on a single SCSI channel/chain, and some controllers support 2 SCSI channels for a total of 30 drives (not that you’ll really need that many drives these days since 30+ GB drives are common and affordable).ATA/EIDE drives are nice because they’re generally cheaper than SCSI drives for roughly the same performance & capacity, and ATA drives are the most common boot drive in PCs and Macs today (so you can create an audio partition on your boot drive and start using Pro Tools right away). ATA/66 and ATA/33 disk controllers support plenty of bandwidth for Pro Tools LE sessions (66 MB/sec and 33 MB/sec, respectively). One limitation of ATA/EIDE drives is that they must be mounted internally, and most motherboards only support a maximum of 4 IDE channels (one or two of which may be already in use by CD/CDR/DVD drives). If you can get by with two internally mounted EIDE drives, they’re a great value (I bought a 7200 RPM, 30 GB ATA/66 drive rated at 8ms seek for $150 recently).

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