Patrick
Bottom line is that IDE is cheaper, slower version of scsi and will never give you the advantages of scsi.
Simplifications like that are good for people who have very little knowledge about computers but want to expand their home PC. But if you go deeper, then there are more options. There are IDE RAID units which use IDE disks but connect to the computer as a single SCSI device, see e.g. http://www.raidweb.com/ide.html, http://www.promise.com/, ... There are ATA RAID controllers based on PCI cards which provide IDE channels (e.g. the FastTrak100 cards, http://www.promise.com/). Performance of these solutions may be quite sufficient for a given task, see e.g. http://www4.tomshardware.com/storage/01q4/011023/index.html So people building TB storage facilities may end up with a mixture of SCSI and IDE. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se