At one point, SCSI held a significant advantage over IDE/ATA in terms of the types of
devices each interface supported. Since SCSI is a high-level system interface used by
performance machines, there has always been a wide variety of different kinds of hardware
produced for the SCSI interface. In contrast, IDE/ATA began as a hard disk interface, and
support for other types of hardware was only added later on. Even as late as 1997, there
were many more hardware choices if you had a SCSI system than if you went with IDE.
This has changed in recent years. As the number of IDE/ATA systems on the market has
grown, many manufacturers have migrated their devices to the IDE interface. A good example
is that of CD-RW drives; a few years ago you needed a SCSI system if you wanted to use a
CD-RW drive, but they are now commonly available for both interfaces. There are still more
different device choices for SCSI than IDE, but the difference is less important than it
once was.
One place where SCSI beats IDE/ATA easily is in support for external devices: IDE/ATA
has none. SCSI drives can even be located in a different room from the machine that is
using them, if that's an issue for some reason.
Next: Device Availability and Selection
