[geeks] Amiga 2000 acelerator card?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

>>> You know, SATA is an option, for $50 or so these days...
>>
>> I highly recommend this route.
>
> Wasn't SCSI always a popular upgrade for power users on Mac, and
> couldn't the SATA upgrade be considered the same thing, with an
> additional advantage in cost?

Well, Macs used to use only SCSI for their storage buses.  IDE crept in
through CD drives and hard drives in the low-end models.  As chatty as
IDE is, anyone who needed decent storage throughput without taxing the
CPU really needed to upgrade to SCSI.

And, yes, SATA carries with it many of those benefits plus having drives
that are affordable by normal folks.  You can't connect tons of devices
to the bus, but needs are different these days; a lot of things that
connected to SCSI connect to USB and Firewire today, and disks are large
enough that few people need more than one or two disks.

> I mean, aren't SATA drives are mostly coming with feature sets similar
> to the ones that Ultra-Wide and better SCSI drives always came with?

Well, truthfully, recent ATA implementations have a lot of those same
advantages, but has been constrained by the legacy bus design (the
controllers on the drives are essentially ISA devices, with the IDE bus
being an emulated 16-bit ISA bus) and the requisite compatibility with
old crap that has hindered the PC architecture in general.

Since a SATA drive will never need to deal with an old crap IDE device
on the same port, and since the bus itself is a much more modern design,
devices can exploit the capabilities mentioned in the standard more
readily.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "If we keep our pride, though paradise is lost, we
Elgin, TX        (   will pay the price, but we cannot count the cost."
USA               )                             --Neil Peart, "Bravado"