Supporting continuous media: is Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) better than SCSI?

The existing SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) parallel bus has been widely used in supporting multimedia applications. However, it may not fully utilize the aggregate throughput from disks in supporting continuous media because of its unfair bus accesses. The emerging serial interface, Serial Storage Architecture (SSA), provides high data bandwidth, fair accesses and fault tolerance. The fairness algorithm in SSA ensures that a fraction of the data bandwidth is allocated to each disk. In this paper, we study the performance of SSA and SCSI in supporting continuous media.