Backup SCSI vs USB

[scott_417]

Nowadays, when you shop around for a computer, you'll probably won't find it equipped with a SCSI, or even encorage to have it. Instead you'll find more USB ports available. The external hardwares also are made USB compatible.

I wonder if this SCSI thing is to be out, while USB is positioned in?


Please share your opinion.


Thnaks.

Scott

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

USB won't replace SCSI. SCSI and USB are intended for different usage.

SCSI is very fast, USB is very slow (compared with scsi).

USB are good for removable media and devices.

SCSI are good for storage/tape devices.

[Curtis Ballard]

Parallel SCSI may be fading away but will be around for a long time and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) will probably take over that market and probably have a lower cost.

As another poster said current USB is much slower than current SCSI of just about any flavor. It works fine for slower transfer rate devices like hard drives and DDS tapes but won't work well at all for something like and LTO3 tape drive. It will probably get faster but it is unlikely to ever be as fast as whatever happens to be the latest form of SCSI.

Personally I don't like USB for storage devices. I don't think the transfer protocol is very well suited to storage but it has become some common that people are using it that way.

[Uwe Zessin]

When I could barely spell USB, I was sceptical, too, but after gaining some experience I have to say:

** I *LOVE* USB storage devices (disks, sticks)!! **

They are great to back up my notebook or an arbitrary server during deployment when no regular backup environment is in place.

They are great to move some data between computers.

Sure, USB does not beat a high-end internal SCSI device, but: hey, it's not meant to do that!!

[Kelvin Chen]

Just want to add another comment,

USB has a higher overhead for the read/write operation than SCSI. Also the spin revolution is slower in USB, than SCSI (but it may change soon as SATA has achieve 10K)

And i do found more error using USB device to backup.

HTH