I must admit I think of ADPT largely as a provider of things SCSI, although I know they have other products. Despite a longstanding personal preference for SCSI drives on my machines, and despite being an ADPT shareholder, I am beginning to think Adaptec is going to have to dramatically change its product pricing downward in order to compete. It used to be a big (e.g. 500 Meg, which was big not so long ago) disk drive was a thousand dollars and a SCSI card was $200 +/-. Now, however, a big IDE drive can be had for $300-400, and doesn't even need a separate controller. SCSI drives, on the other hand, command a premium of about a hundred bucks over their IDE twins, and then you need a controller card on top of that -- and it seems like the controller cards are STILL $200 +/-. When the relative price disparity gets as great as it now is, I think it becomes a viable performance option to substitute 2 IDE drives for 1 SCSI drive + controller.
Clearly Adaptec believes it is able to continue to charge relatively high dollars for its controller cards, but I wonder how long that will last. What got me thinking about this is seing that even Sun, a traditional bastion of SCSI, is putting IDE drives on some of its new workstations. See:
sun.com
JMHO, of course. |
