29 Feb
2008
29 Feb
'08
7:17 a.m.
On Feb 28, 2008, at 12:19 AM, tiggerlasv at aim.com wrote:
I stopped holding my breath for creation of a Q-Bus
IDE
controller a long time ago. While I like to think that I
do a reasonable job troubleshooting some problems,
I'm definitely not a hardware/software engineer.
It has been done. Chuck Dickman did one, I think. It's actually
really easy...device drivers are the hard part.
It would have been nice, but it makes more sense
these days to go Q-Bus to SATA. I would imagine
that it would be alot less hassle, and certainly alot less
real estate on the board, with the smaller connectors,
and fewer traces.
Ohhh noonono. The only similarity between ATA and SATA is three
letters in the acronym. SATA is a very intelligent, very complex,
and VERY VERY FAST connection. That's so far beyond "impractical"
that I don't even want to think about it.
If you can do Q-bus to Compact Flash, then you can do
Q-bus to IDE, because CF *is* an IDE interface.
Those wonderful CF to IDE adapter boards generally don't
have any circuitry on-board, except to drive status LED's.
Well, not exactly, but CF is *mostly* IDE (ATA). For nearly all
applications, they are interchangeable. One difference that comes to
mind is that CF is required to implement 8-bit transfer modes while
ATA is not. This is immaterial in most situations, but I thought it
might be a good idea to mention it.
I could see no discernable speed increase between
using real SCSI drives, and the IDE <> CF adapter,
although I wasn't trying to do any significant benchmarking.
(The CQD-200's are kind of poky controllers anyway,
so this didn't really surprise me.)
They are?? I thought they were among the fastest Qbus SCSI
adapters available.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL