On Sat, 15 Nov 1997, Hauke Fath wrote:

> At 1:43 Uhr +0100 14.11.1997, Colin Wood wrote:
> >Ken Nakata wrote:
> 
> >> No, what I meant by "industry standard" parts were the drives.  Since
> >> there's virtually no room for creativity in the host side of interface
> >> as far as the vanilla IDE is concerned, I thought it's got to be
> >> something on the drive itself if Apple had decided to deviate from the
> >> ANSI standard.
> 
> A few days ago I got definite confirmation from <news:de.comp.sys.mac> that
> the P630 runs fine with just about any current IDE drive model you care to
> throw into it. So I do not really think Apple got a "special" IDE drive.

Oops, I could have been clearer - yeah, Apple explicitly says that you can
use an EIDE (i.e. no old IDE drives, almost anything current) drive. 
Their technote on the Q/P63x series also says that those cannot use drives
bigger than 4GB in that particular machine.  I have successfully replaced
my 360MB IBM mechanism in my 638 with a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball, and then
later a 3.2GB IBM DeskStar.  The computer simply recognized the drive each
time, nothing to do other than plug it in and format it.

> On the other hand, IDE is a classical example of the word "The nice thing
> about standards is that there are so many to choose from". I am not even
> sure I'd know what a "non-standard" IDE drive would look like, much less a
> "standard" one.

The IBM 360MB drive that came in my 638 wasn't even Apple-labelled or
modified in any way (like the SCSI drives usually are with custom Apple
EPROM). 

> >According to the developer notes for the LC/Quadra 630, Apple's IDE
> >interface follows a "subset" of the ANSI standard, whatever that means.
> 
> A good thing, too. They dropped an endless source of pain, the master-slave
> mode.
> 
> We might get more of that -- I've heard they start to ship middle class
> models (Gossamer) with IDE; but what is safe when even Sun starts to look
> at IDE...

All PowerPC Performas in the 5200, 5300, 6200, 6300, 6400 class have EIDE. 
PowerComputing and other clones, such as the Motorola StarMax, all used
EIDE in the lower-end models, and even used ATAPI CD-ROM drives and
Quantum BigFoot 5.25" hard drive mechanisms sometimes (PCC customers were
given the option of a SCSI mechanism for more $$$).

--
Nathan Raymond