In general (and this should be true for any variant of ATA), in a single disk workstation, an good 7200RPM ATA disk will be fine, but if you start having multiple disks per controller, then the advantages of SCSI quickly become important. Since most people with PC's are concerned with cost, a PC with a good ATA disk is probably a good choice. You will notice few UNIX workstation vendors ship fast machines with ATA adapters...
Hope this helps some,
Bryan K. Baskin
-----Original Message----- Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 12:43 PM To: 'xansys@o...'
Is anyone aware of any recent performance benchmarks of ANSYS on a PC comparing SCSI vs. ATA drives? When I say recent, I mean within the last 6-months. I've heard that the lastest ATA drives have closed the gap and that SCSI drives are no longer worth the premium you have to pay for them? Is this true?
Since most problems (the class my company does) can be solved with the iterative solvers which keep I/O to a minimum, I wouldn't expect access speed to be as critical as it used to be. Anyone care to comment?
Joseph T. Metrisin
Structural Methods Pratt & Whitney/United Technologies M/S: 714-03 P.O. Box 109600 West Palm Beach, FL. 33410-9600