rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) (05/03/86)
I seem to be having some trouble getting this information, and need to know SOON. Several magazines have pointed out that the Atari OS will be using X.3t9 (SCSI) protocol between their drives an the ST. What I'd like to find out is: Will REAL SCSI be supported, or will the DMA be Yet Another Proprietary Interface? Since a few of you have ad a chance to see the new ST hard drive, I was hoping I could get some more info. One of the reasons I'd like to find out is that there are some real good deals on surplus ST-506 drives, and a real cheap (under $150) SCSI to ST-506 adapter cards/chips coming out. I know Atari has been holding up the hard drive until the hard drives could be made real cheap, but what is the hold-up on the interface? If Atari comes out with nice, low cost SCSI drives, could they be used on a MacPlus? If Atari is not going SCSI :-(, will they be coming out with a good backup system in the near future? Feeding 20+ floppies for an hour or two, just doesn't sound like fun. Atari has avoided most of the mistakes that were made with the 800. The printer, serial, and MIDI interfaces are nice and standardized. The floppy and video interfaces are a little weird, but not to the point where it is a major drawback. Let's hope the "DMA" interface is as well thought out. For the folks who haven't seen it yet, there's a real nice write-up on SCSI in the May issue of Byte. Ciarcia(sp?) is adding one to his SB-180.