On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Chris Gilbert wrote:

> > The internal IDE and IDE podules (ICS,simtec etc.) will provide 1MB/sec 
> > xfer rates. This is limited by these cards being 16 bit PIO interfaces.
> > Currently the only faster IDE is the RapIDE which is not yet supported.
> > However from conversations I have last week RapIDE a high performance 
> > RapIDE driver *may* become a reality very soon.
> 
> Does this mean that the info they promised at Acorn World is coming to you
> soon? with a card?

Well I did stress the *may* ;-)

Some sort of driver will be appearing *very* soon.
Due to the demand for a driver etc. I have now purchased a RapIDE card so
that I can write the driver as it seemed clear that I could not get one
otherwise (the got informed by YES at BETT that I should have been able to
get it at developers price).
This means that I now have the hardware so can start sorting out a driver.
I have determined the addresses for the basic mapping of the IDE driver
registers (Great what you can do with a few resistors ;-))

This will allow me to produce a driver with the same performance as the
internal IDE.

A 32 bit driver should follow shortly afterwards as I am now bypassing YES
and talking directly with the card designer. Now that some technical
difficulties have been overcome I understand that releasing the
information to me will not be a problem....
We wait and see ;-)

> If a fast xfer rate is managed on RapIDE would this be the better medium
> for baseing a news-server?
If I get the 32 bit I/O info then this should mean that we will have an
IDE driver that will provide similar performance to the SCSI 2 cards and
would support up to 4 drives.
However given the track record of RapIDE so far I cannot garentee
timescales ;-(

Cheers,
				Mark


Mark Brinicombe				amb@physig.ph.kcl.ac.uk
Research Associate			http://www.ph.kcl.ac.uk/~amb/
Department of Physics			tel: 0171 873 2894
King's College London			fax: 0171 873 2716