Re: IDE CD-ROMs

[TMatsumu@example.com]

I wish I had time to get into this more, as I too endorse both IDE and SCSI, 
depending on the target use, and my company also sells solutions (IC's for 
IDE drives, and in US EIDE to PCI bus adapters, fastest EIDE/ISA solutions 
from our Future Domain product line, see http://www.adaptec.com, new 
products) for both platforms plus a half dozen emerging storage standards 
you will see products from in the coming months.

First of all, EIDE is not a standard, it is a marketing program by Western 
Digital.  This is fact.

Second, ATA-2 is a marketing program by Seagate, and ATA-3 drafts are 
constantly changing, which is fine, because no ATA-3 products exist!

IDE is not just 16 bit, check out our web pages for info. on our double word 
IDE/ISA adapters, and my old $29 Promise EIDE even had 32-bit drivers.

ATAPI is a (ATA-PI) is one way for CD-ROMs to inexpensively connect to the 
second port of an IDE disk adapter.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Please see ftp://ftp.wi.leidenuniv.nl/pub/faqs/ata1.faq for more info. on 
these issues.  I think for now we've seen IDE* and ATAP* stuff get a lions 
share of the low end market, I certainly bought into it for certain low end 
projects, but for a multi-tasking, multi-user environment, I can't see the 
benefits when solutions such as SCSI, fast, wide, ultra, ssa, fibre channel, 
etc. are on the market now, and offer 20 MBytes and multithreading support 
now.

When I bought my IDE ATAPI CD-ROM 4x, SCSI solutions of same speed were 
double.  Now that gap has narrowed it to 10-20% more.  Today I'd buy SCSI.  
DOS/Win95 single user systems will continue to proliferate with > 50% of 
intel MB's containing an on-board IDE controller, it makes the cost of IDE 
vs. SCSI significantly less at the retail consumer level with no adapter 
needed, but I can't imagine people using Unix and  Novell servers with IDE.  
Well, this is Japan, anything can happen, gambatte!

Ted (only recommends IDE for low end single tasking OS/s)


*****
Ted Matsumura, Adaptec Japan ATM Program Manager
InterNetworking Technology (INTO)
Adaptec Japan Ltd.
(03) 5276-8433 (Voice)
(03) 5276-9364 (Fax)
tmatsumu@example.com
http://www.rahul.net/tedm
*****
-------------
Original Text
>From owner-tlug@example.com, on 10/3/95 12:49 PM:
>>>>> "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