mike@twiki.UUCP (Mike Heggen) (06/02/90)
clear@bearcave.actrix.co.nz (Charlie Lear) writes: > What I'd love to know, is what is Integrated Drive Electronics all about, > can you make them work in different machines other than those normally > fitted with them at the factory, and can a motherboard IDE interface > successfully run various makes of IDE drives? Can you run two different > IDE drives in the same machine? Can you run an IDE drive in tandem with > something else? What makes them better than anything since sliced bread? > What makes them suck? Well, our store will not sell anything less than IDE drives if we can help it.....they're that good, yes. Like other people have told you, IDE drives integrate the controller right onto the drive assembly. This allows the drive manufacturer to customize the controller to match their drive as best as possible. It also eliminates some of the problems associated with the older ST-506 RLL interface drives which had signal degradation problems if the control cable was in the worng place inside your box. All the drive manufactururer has to do is present the data to the AT bus, so the IDE interface card is just that: an interface card. There is minimal circuitry on the card, since it is largely a pass-through operation plugging directly into the bus. IDE drives can moved about to different machines without difficulty, as the interface is the same. IDE intefaces can handle two IDE drives. IDE will peaceably co-exist with anything other than some SCSI implementations. ESDI and ST-506 do NOT get along well with IDE. That's the bad news. The good news is the performance!!! All data transfers are 16-bit (whch limits them to AT-class machines - oh darn), which easily doubles your throughput over an ST-506 drive (which is 8-bit). A number of drive manufacturer's (Conner and Toshiba, for example) put a little bit o' RAM on the drive for hardware caching, yielding some VERRRRYYY fast data xfer rates......we benchmarked a Toshiba 110 Mb 3.5" IDE drive that came in with an ALR PowerVEISA 386/33 last week. QAplus gave us a data xfer benchmark of 965k/sec, whcih is the fastest non-ESDI drive we have ever seen across our bench. Another nice thing is that you don't have to deal with low-level formatting them, as they come low-levelled from the manufacturer. All ya gotta do is partition it and do a high-level format, which is cake.... In short, I have nothing but good things to say about IDE drives. We have found them to be faster and more relaible than ST-506 drives for about the same cost. Disclaimer: I have no direct association with any of the companies mentioned above. Statements reflect my personal experience and should not, of course, be read as Gospel Truth. Ad nauseum..... -Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------ UUCP: mike@twiki.UUCP GT Power Net: Mike Heggen @ 056/001 Turn this page over for more info....