In article <199802050004.AA26991@world.std.com> you write:
> 
> All of the CDroms, tapes, removable disks are also available for IDE.

As I said, that's not really true.  You can get cdroms, tapes, and
removable media for IDE, yes.  You can also get country, rock, and
classical on 8-track.  Wether you can get the particular country, rock,
and classical you're interested in is quite another matter. :-)

What you can get for IDE is almost all low-end, comsumer-oriented stuff. 
I've yet to see a ATAPI DAT stacker, for example.

> If you can afford them then a CMD or other scsi drive is not a problem
> either.  Really a $400 CDR, SCSI Scanners at $300+++, DAT AND DLT are
> not cheap that I know of so whats $3-400 for a good SCSI board?

Well, you may already have access to the hardware. Or, you may be able to
pick it up cheap. I recently got a DDS-2 DAT 12-cassette autoloader
for $379 (4-cassette would have been $279). If you're the kind of person
who can scrounge up VAX hardware, you probably can also scrounge up some
really good deals on SCSI equipment too, or even find it free from the
same types of places that are giving away VAX stuff.

But if it did come down to $200 (or even $100) for an IDE board or $400
for SCSI, I probably *would* spend the money and get SCSI.  I'd rather
spend $400 and use a SCSI drive I already have than spend $200 and have
to buy a IDE drive I really don't want and that won't be very useful
with any other system I own.  Then again, as I said I'm not in the
market for either product anyway, and the market will determine which
gets built :-) I'm just saying if I had my druthers, I'd go SCSI in a
heartbeat.  Obviously others have differing opinions, and the majority
seems to lean heavily to IDE at the moment.

> Did I not say in the proposal that infairness I didn't research newer
> SCSI chips or their cost?  A cheap board would be hard to do if it 
> required a file pitch 100pin 4 layer SMT layout and used a $15-25 part!

I don't think all the chips are SMT-only.  They're undoubtably more
expensive than the equivalent parts for PIO IDE parts ($.19 of latches?
:->).  Compared to DMA IDE, I dunno. If someone is going to do a IDE
interface, especially PIO, you might as well put a bunch of interfaces
on the board. The incremental cost shouldn't be that much.