On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Bruce Lane wrote:

> 	I'm in favor of saving $$ as much as anyone, but just the
> thought of running what used to be high-end microcomputers (heck,
> borderline minis) with IDE drives gives me the heebie-jeebies,
> especially considering the limitations inherent to the IDE
> architecture, and the "reliability" (or lack thereof) of many of the
> mass-produced drives.

Well, IDE tends to under perform other technologies out there.  I'd agree
with that, but I never did understand anyone saying that the drives were
unreliable.  From the oldest 40Meg Conner drives, to the more recent >10GB
drives, I've never ever once had an IDE drive die on me.  Never ever, in
the span of a whole decade.  However, in the past five years I've had more
SCSI, SDI, SSA and MFM drives on me than I can remember.  Quantum,
Micropolis, Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, all of them have had abysmal troubles
with their non-IDE drives.  These observations are based on my work and
home use experiences with several hundred IDE drives, dozens of SSA
drives, several dozen MFM drives, maybe a dozen SDI drives, and probably
in excess of 1000 SCSI drives.  More than 10% of the SCSI and SSA drives
I've dealt with have died, more than half of the MFM and SDI drives
(forgiveable given their age), but 0% of the IDE drives.  And I've been
running a couple of those IDEs in my home systems 24x7 for more than 7
years now.

I've always attributed this reliability to the fact that IDE/ATA devices
tend to be a bit behind the curve in media density and spindle rates, but
they run a lot cooler, and consume less power than their higher-end
cousins.  And given the current performance levels of IDE drives, if we
had a DMA capable Q-Bus module, there wouldn't be any reason to bad-mouth
IDE given the other more significant limitations of all existing Q-Bus
systems.  Plus you can buy a 20GB IDE drive for under $180US.

The design being discussed is PIO, which is less than desireable, but I
think it'd be a good first step.  It does have 4 ATA channels which can
hold up to 8 IDE devices in master/slave pairs, but given the nature of
IDE you'd probably only want to have 1 device per channel.

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
      IBM 1130 Club Motto:  "Computer People Are Happy People"