Subject: Re: CD-RW/i386/current
To: Peter Seebach <seebs@plethora.net>
From: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
List: current-users
Date: 06/15/2000 17:52:17
On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 09:15:31AM -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
> In message <20000615141019.B4971@pyy.jmp.fi>, Jukka Marin writes:
> >> I think you should have the buffer disk at the other IDE channel than
> >> the CD-RW drive. And "some NetBSD users" are right, in fact you really
> >> want a SCSI drive :)
> 
> >Why? :-)
> 
> Bus arbitration, or something similar.  IDE sucks for doing more than one
> thing at a time - say, for instance, reading from one disk and writing to
> another.  SCSI is very good at it.

Yep - OTOH, my SCSI bus is only 10 MBps with several devices hanging off it
while I could devote one IDE interface for the CD-RW alone (well, maybe).

A SCSI CD-RW would cost me twice the ATAPI price, so I think I'll give the
ATAPI drive a try.  (No, please don't tell me that in the US, you can get
SCSI drives for less than $100 because they cost almost $500 over here,
sigh..)

  -jm