TonyB, illustrates another advantage. My SCSI drives almost always last until I choose to replace them. At home, I have had a number of SCSI drives in systems for 6 or 7 years with out issue. On my systems that have IDE I often have them go out with in the first two years. I have never had a SCSI drive fail me in the first 3 years.
I have a good idea of hard drive reliability, because for about two years I was head system administrator for a building with 50-60 servers (depending on when) and 350 workstations. I probably personally replaced on the order of 100 hard drives in that time and I know the people under me replaced many more. (Realize we had over 5TB of storage (that was what was backed up every night) mostly made up of 4.5GB and 9.1GB drives and many RAID arrays). We used mostly Seagate SCSI drives (mostly relabeled) and they tended to almost always die when the drives were 5-6 years old (Obviously installed before I got there).
We were supposed to every few months check which hard drives were approaching 5 years old and try to replace them. It was a good idea in theory, but we were generally too busy fire fighting to get more than about half of them replaced (We always got the critical servers though). The workstations we could always Ignite, so it wasn't too big a deal if a workstation drive failed.
Someone there claimed something about the drives having a liquid inside that the drive spun on and since these drives were always on the liquid would spread out, and after a while the drive would have issues spinning back up because the liquid was no longer providing good lubrication. I do not know the truth of that explanation, but about half the time we could get the data off a drive by taking out the drive (they were all hotswap), shaking the drive, and putting it back in. It was very rare for a SCSI drive to fail when it was less than 3 years old.
I have a good idea of hard drive reliability, because for about two years I was head system administrator for a building with 50-60 servers (depending on when) and 350 workstations. I probably personally replaced on the order of 100 hard drives in that time and I know the people under me replaced many more. (Realize we had over 5TB of storage (that was what was backed up every night) mostly made up of 4.5GB and 9.1GB drives and many RAID arrays). We used mostly Seagate SCSI drives (mostly relabeled) and they tended to almost always die when the drives were 5-6 years old (Obviously installed before I got there).
We were supposed to every few months check which hard drives were approaching 5 years old and try to replace them. It was a good idea in theory, but we were generally too busy fire fighting to get more than about half of them replaced (We always got the critical servers though). The workstations we could always Ignite, so it wasn't too big a deal if a workstation drive failed.
Someone there claimed something about the drives having a liquid inside that the drive spun on and since these drives were always on the liquid would spread out, and after a while the drive would have issues spinning back up because the liquid was no longer providing good lubrication. I do not know the truth of that explanation, but about half the time we could get the data off a drive by taking out the drive (they were all hotswap), shaking the drive, and putting it back in. It was very rare for a SCSI drive to fail when it was less than 3 years old.