Re: IDE CD-ROMs

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

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

    >> disk.  Works good.  Ran into trouble when it didn't have a
    >> driver for my IDE NEC cd-rom (hah, teaches me to buy IDE stuff ;)
    >> ), anyways, I wasn't

    Jim> SCSI is definitely out-dated.  Linux works fine with the NEC
    Jim> IDE CD-ROM that came with my Gateway machine and with the
    Jim> much better ones from Creative Technology that I designed.  :-)

Uh-huh.  I have 8 devices hanging off my AMI SCSI host (2 floppies, a
floppy tape, a 1GB Fujitsu HDD, a 2GB Micropolis HDD, a Texel CD-ROM,
the Fujitsu MO I've had such trouble getting interfaced, and an HP
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
(a DAT drive, in particular; depends on timing of getting a new
machine and whether I get the MO working well).  I have *no* IDE host
in the system.  Your suggestion is ... ?

If you mean that SCSI mass storage devices are outdated, tell me more.
I'm due for a new machine in the next 6 months.  I haven't had time to
follow the hardware wars, though.  I had the vague impression that the
new IDE stuff was basically a bag on a kludge on a wart on a frog on a
bump on a log in a hole in the bottom of the sea.

This is not so?  What architectures are IDE hosts available for
besides iAPX + *ISA/PCI bus (are we really all going to move up to '686
and '786, or are we going to do Alphas and PowerPCs, ne)?  Are those
new Intel chips going to be backward compatible?  If so, can they
really compete with PowerPC, Alpha, and similar architectures not
constrained to transparent support of MicroSludge applications
designed for Lose3.1?

    Jim> Kernels after about 1.1.8x have included native support for
    Jim> IDE CD-ROMs.

Which ones?  Or is there an IDE standard that means something, ie,
that essentially all reputable manufacturers implement correctly?
(This isn't true for SCSI, as a brief look at
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/ will show.  `Grep -i' for 'blacklist'....)

-- 
                            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