> On Fri, 24 May 1996, Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com wrote:
> > Well, everyone who wants good performance, and is willing to save up
> > and spend a little.  :-)  Seriously, SCSI is the way to go if there's
> > any way that you can.  But, if you already have IDE ....

No argument with that, but here is my situation.  When I was twisting arms
to get money for my NetBSD system, the DOS-minded folks holding the
purse strings couldn't be talked into SCSI.  Now I have NetBSD running
quite nicely on a pair of IDE drives, 540M and 1.2G in size, both of
which can do EIDE kinds of things, and handle PIO 3 (and maybe 4) modes.
The dumb $12.00 non-vesa IDE controller running those drives is certainly
not getting the most out of them, so I am interested in investing a
wallet crippling $29.00 - $59.00 into a vlb-eide card (sounds like a
good bang for the buck upgrade in performance).  I still believe moving
to SCSI would be the "right thing", but getting almost 2G in disk space,
as well as a decent controller, would set me back a few hundred dollars
to say the least.....  Anyway, you can understand my interest in an
enhanced wd.c driver.

> > ....  If you could put a decent bottom-end EIDE driver under the
> > SCSI subsystem, you'd probably have a very nicely functional
> > system.
> The same is true of the Amiga4000 and its built in IDE interface.
> Commodore went so far as to call the IDE driver `SCSI.device', ....

This is fairly mind-bending to me, but my reading about EIDE issues
did mention that a lot of the EIDE protocol concepts come right from
scsi-2, so this isn't all that great a surprise.  Makes me glad I stir
up discussion on groups like this.

> A lot of new motherboards have built in interfaces that support ATA mode 3
> drives.  They are practically free equipment on there.  Why not let people
> use them?  Some people have better things to spend money on than a $100
> SCSI-FAST interface when they have something that will do the job just as
> good.

Absolutely true, and even if you are buying plug in controllers, a good
EIDE controller is in the $30-$50 range, and a good SCSI is in the $100-$200
range.  SCSI does have its advantages (multiple targets on one bus, DMA
capability), and you get what you pay for.  IDE benefits from the agressive
price battling in the PC marketplace, and the technology seems to be
continually improving.

I think the time has come for an ide.c driver that handles the EIDE features,
PIO-3 mode support, 32 bit transfers, and who knows what else (ATAPI CD-roms?)
I am tempted to take a stab at it, but would need to use an "expendible"
system for driver testing and development (my nice machine at work needs to
be a stable platform for getting other work done, I can well imagine the havoc
that tinkering with a disk driver could cause).

-- 
	Tom Trebisky			Steward Observatory
	ttrebisky@as.arizona.edu	University of Arizona
	(520) 621-5135			Tucson, Arizona 85721