You would be very suprised then..

The only thing really holding ATA drives back is that the manufacturers save their fastest mechanism (10K-15K RPM) for their high priced SCSI lines. RPM for RPM, ATA drives outperform SCSI in any decent benchmark, and several indecent ones too.

Even with SCSI, it's desirable not to have more than a couple of heavily accessed drives per SCSI bus, to reduce contention issues.

Sure, SCSI can do a decent job if one opts for very very expensive fibre channel busses and the like, but in real life, ATA wins hands down for interface cost and performance.

Heck.. the current contract work I am doing here involves a very nifty ATA interface, that can handle up to 8 drives per channel, with full overlap between them.. requires modern drives, of course -- with tagged queuing. These days, that means IBM DeskStar drives.

Quite a fast system. I just wish I could obtain 10K or 15K RPM ATA drives to really make it smoke!

The reason for the enduring popularity of the ATA interface is it's electrical and software simplicity, coupled with quite high performance. This makes it ideal for embedded applications, and anywhere that cost is important.

Cheers