Re: IDE CD-ROMs

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Tittsler <jwt@example.com> writes:

    Jim> In article <m0szuSW-0004NeC@example.com>,
    Jim> turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)
    Jim> wrote:

    >> Scanjet).  Even though it was a slow (50Mhx '486) processor on
    >> a slow (EISA) bus, it still blew the typical early Pentia with
    >> EIDE drives at the OSU Econ department out of the water on disk
    >> I/O.  (The 4MB cache had a lot to do with that, of course.)
    >> There may be more stuff coming

    Jim> It depends a lot on the host adapters (and SCSI variety)
    Jim> being compared.  IDE is only a 16-bit wide data path.

My box had an old Fujitsu SCSI(1) drive, Fast (but not Wide) SCSI-II
[sic] adapter on EISA bus, being compared against Pentium plus onboard
EIDE, Connor disk maybe?  I told the guy in question that his money
was better spent on memory or bus width or disk cache, but
nooooo.... he had to have the biggest fastest processor.

[very useful discussion of ATA and bus standards dropped sinceI have
no quarrel, nor expertise to support it with anyway ;-) ]

Thank you very much for the useful discussion!!

    Jim> The vast majority of ATAPI CD-ROMs implement the ATAPI
    Jim> standard reasonably correctly.  We are beaten into line by
    Jim> Microsoft and IBM so that we work with their device drivers.

It's a damn shame Microsoft software and IBM hardware don't work with
their own damn drivers.  At least I knew the Osborne 1 (my first
computer) was going to be incompatible with everything.  (I could have
gone S-100 compatible, anybody remember the S-100?)  But my StinkPad
don't work with all sorts of stuff (Linux PCMCIA; the advertised 256
colors VGA only works with a driver that only works with Windowze, not
even Messy-DOG; none of the IBM-supplied or third party disk-caching
software I have stands up to very large builds, eg, Ghostscript with
DJGPP---eventually the disk gets confused and tells me the HDD's DOOR
IS OPEN!  That's scary---I mean an imaginary herd of elephants might
walk in through that hard drive's imaginary door!; and that's just the
incompatibilities I can remember off the top of my head.)  Not to
mention that IBM's loadable drivers are so inefficiently coded that
they take up double the space of third party drivers that work on
everything except my StinkPad, apparently.  This despite the fact that
IBM's ROM-BIOS extensions take up an extra 256KB of high memory (or
make it useless to QEMM, which is the same thing).  Arrrgggh!

Rant over.  Thank you for listening.  We now return you to your
regularly scheduled program, "A Security Blanket Called Linux".

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Socio-Economic Planning                         Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com