From: davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn)
Subject: Re: Future Amiga chipsets
Organization: Qld Dept Primary Industries
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 03:55:50 GMT

In article <BzBzGq.J3w@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>In article <1992Dec16.003000.20403@news.Hawaii.Edu> jimmy@mickey.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Jimmy Chan) writes:
>>
>>Marc, a couple of things here.  Currently IBM compatible systems >$1500
>>are loaded with IDE so, what does that say about your justification of the
>>$1500 cutoff.  Totally baseless if you need to ask.  
>
>   Hardly.  IBM clones are a special case.  Most of the hardware that you
>would hang off a SCSI bus is available in PC-specific versions, so there
>are fewer penalties for a PC having IDE rather than SCSI.

Yes, so when you add a tape drive to a PC, you fill a slot and frig about
trying to find yet another interrupt and DMA channel (well, if the tape drive's
any good, it should be using DMA) and I/O address on the AT bus for it.  Great!
Then you can get a CD-ROM drive and do it all again.  Sorry, I forgot  - you
hang your CD-ROM off your sound card - what a logical place to put it!

 There are fewer
>tape drives, CD-ROM drives, etc.. available in Amiga-specific or Mac-
>specific versions, so that Amigas and Macs are forced to standardize on
>SCSI.  It works well enough in the Mac world, as all Macs have SCSI.

I agree - using SCSI is a much more elegant solution than the clone method.

 But
>when Commodore put IDE into the A4000, it cut substantially the number of
>options available to A4000 owners for expanding their Amigas.

Really?  When I bought my A2000, it didn't come with a SCSI interface.  I do
have one now - I got it with my hard drive.  What's wrong with that?  When an
A4000 owner wants to add a tape drive, they can buy one of the cheap Zorro II
SCSI cards and use it now, or they can wait for the Zorro III SCSI-2 board.
What's the big deal?  When a PC user buys a tape drive, they get an interface
card, so what's the difference?

Tha advantage of this is that you only have to pay for a SCSI interface when
the need arises.  People who only need an IDE hard drive don't need to pay for
it.  Those who do need SCSI have a choice of low-cost Zorro II SCSI or high
performance Zorro-III SCSI-2.

I think putting IDE in the A4000 was a great decision - it gives freedom of
choice to the purchaser.  Commodore did the right thing with this one...

>   Hardly.  If Commodore had included SCSI as standard hardware, most people
>would have been happy with it and would not have bothered to upgrade to 
>SCSI II.  Real SCSI II hard drives are EXPENSIVE, and there are no SCSI II
>tape drives or SCSI II CD-ROM drives or SCSI II floptical drives.  The only
>real major advantage of SCSI II over SCSI is the increased performance with a
>small number of SCSI II hard drives. 

And yet I seem to remember lots of complaints from certain people that the
A3000's SCSI wasn't SCSI-2, and how the rest of the market's going that way,
and we're behind in technology yet again, not enough R&D, etc., etc.

You've got to remember - there's just no pleasing some people...


-- 
David Meiklejohn (davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au)
 - PC's, Unix, and networks by day, Amigas by night...
Currently residing in Mareeba, Far North Queensland, Australia