IDE Lovin’">IDE Lovin’
Today I watched a shuttle launch, from my front lawn. That was cool.
So, I just finished reading a new Ars article about SCSI interfaces. I’ve never played with that stuff, so it was interesting. I would probably switch over to SCSI for my next computer, but the devices can be prohibitively expensive. It’s all about marketing… They market the SCSI drives to the IT big boys, and the IDE devices to the home/SOHO/workstation market.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that I need longer IDE cables. The problem is that the length between the two devices on the chain is not long enough — I want a hard drive and an optical drive on the same chain, and that just isn’t happening when the two are more than a foot apart. Right now my drives are setup like this:
Chain 0: Master = System HDD, Slave = Data HDD
Chain 1: Master = DVD-ROM, Slave = CD-RW
That’s just plain inefficient, because I want to do things like disc-to-disc copying. Also, copying data from one hard drive to the other takes forever. This is because an IDE controller can only talk to one device per chain per clock cycle (I think that’s right); SCSI does not have this limitation. What I want to do is this:
Chain 0: Master = System HDD, Slave = CD-RW
Chain 1: Master = Data HDD, Slave = DVD-ROM
This way, the hard drives are on different chains. Also, the CD-RW and Data drive are on different chains, which makes file burning better (since most files I would want to burn would be on the Data drive). And, the optical drives are on different chains, which makes disc-to-disc copying feasible. The problem is that the space between two devices on most IDE cables is about 6”. I need like 18”.
Computer geeks and their acronyms. Not to mention numbering that starts with zero.
I also discovered a bug in my implementation of moveable type, which I will fix… later. I don’t use the feature right now, so it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of like an article system, where each of my posts consists of a short excerpt on the front page, and then you can click on to read the rest. You can actually see the other page of this post by clicking on the time underneath the title, but there won’t be anything else there because I haven’t implemented it. #