[sniped stuff about using IDE drives]

>But, this will not give you more performance. I doubt that this
>will give you more than 2MB/s sustained transfer rate at the
>most with optimized drivers.

Why?

>To have more on the IDE drive, you will have to buy, e.g. a RapIDE
>interface, and they cost approximately the same as high-performance
>SCSI cards.

Well half the price actually

>Also, the best IDE drives can not compete with the best SCSI
>drives.

Well the best SCSI discs are of the 'power-workstation' range and
unless you've got *LOTS* of money they are not an option

> My HP drive is capable of 4-5 MB/s sustained data
>transfer rate, and this is slow compared to todays standard.
>The best ones are approaching 10 MB/s (at least 7-8 MB/s).

And? Standard desktop machine IDE drives go around 4-5 Mb/sec
for !Bg and up, new mode 5 drives can go as fast as 'Fast+Wide SCSI II'
now you know.

>At present, though the IDE drivers in RiscBSD are faster
>than the SCSI ones, but this will improve with time.
>It is just a matter of optimizing the SCSI drivers.

Since the RiscPC can only handle about 7Mb/s peak through the
interface bus I can't see why SCSI discs are so much better other
than the fact that you can't currently get IDE discs bigger than 3.2 Gb
why will they be better? And how exactly are they going to be faster
than a much cheaper IDE device on a RiscPC?

(This is a question - I'm not tring to get at you or anything - just
thought I'd mention that before I get flamed!)

James