James Hunter wrote:

>[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.
>
[snip]

Having been partly responsible for this particular IDE - SCSI debate, and
having advocated cheap big IDE drives for RiscBSD installations, can I play
devil's advocate for a moment?

The problem with IDE drives on the Risc PC isn't the speed that they can
deliver, nor the speed of the RPC bus, but, of course, the speed of the
on-board IDE interface. The Yellowstone RapIDE i/face is now 140ukp inc VAT,
but is it supported by RiscBSD?

Apart from that approach, the options are a SCSI II i/face plus drive, or a
larger IDE drive to the motherboard i/face. YMMV, but according to David
Holden's !HDspeed, a 1.6Gb Conner IDE reaches a peak of about 1.4Mb/sec on the
motherboard i/face. Other IDE drives may run a little faster. On the other
hand, even though RPC compatible SCSI interfaces somehow don't seem to match
the sheer speed of PC compatible ones, they'll surpass 1.4Mb/sec quite easily
- even my non-DMA Castle SCSI II card manages that with quite old SCSI drives.

So, for the power-user, SCSI has to be the way to go - but it can't touch
1.6Gb for 135 ukp!  ;-)
Cheers.
-- 
*** Stuart Bell (sabell@argonet.co.uk)        Running Risc OS and ***
***      RiscBSD on an Acorn Risc PC in a Wintel-free environment ***