Yeah, I don't recall there being a lack of interest in one.  I think
around that discussion, there was some debate about whether we went with
the Ukrainian PIO/IDE option or came up with a DMA/IDE card.  Given than
the PIO design was baked, it seemed like the best choice as far as being
able to start building the boards sooner.  DMA/IDE is technically the best
IDE choice, but can we actually design and build one cheaply?  But then
given the SCSI chipsets which exist, is it any more of a hassle to design
and build our own DMA/SCSI adapter?  I don't know... but I'm sure some
people on this list might have some clues.

People can argue that IDE is inferior to SCSI in many ways... I'd agree
with that.  But when you're talking about a sub-MIP MicroVAX II, who cares
if you can connect a whole world of superfast disks to the box.  You're
gonna be bottle-necked by the CPU anyhow.  I think a single 80GB IDE drive
on a MicroVAX II would be great.  For a VAX, the more recent IDE devices
are plenty fast in comparion to the CPUs hosting the drives.  My big worry
would be in fscking a dirty 80GB filesystem :-)

Actually, one *nice* use for an IDE based controller would be to add a
100MB+ solid state SanDisk.  You could have all of your storage directly
mounted to the Q-bus card.

I still think a Q-bus PCMCIA bridge would be very useful.  We could really
test the portability of all the device driver code written for PC-Card
devices used elsewhere in the NetBSD tree.

-brian.

On Thu, 21 Dec 2000 zaft@azstarnet.com wrote:

> 	I'm interested in one.  I'd love a SCSI controller but all the ones
> I've seen are several hundred dollars at best.

> > Why don't you simply buy a used SCSI controller ?
> > You're not limited to 18 inch of cable length, you can use tapes, cdrom,
> > disk, ...
> >
> > Just my .02 cents.
> >
> > cheers,
> > emanuel
> >
> > P.S. BTW, probably a year ago, I offered to this group to make an IDE
> > controller with DMA.
> >      NOBODY was interested in an IDE version ;-)
> >
>

--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
        The year after '99 will be referred to as "2K".
             Two digits, no fuss, no muss!  -- K.