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From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: IDE drives: good or evil?
Message-ID: <7633@crash.cts.com>
Date: 18 Feb 91 22:36:01 GMT
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goat@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Craig Stephen Campbell) writes:
>  OK, now I'm really curious. I have had nothing but positive experiences
>with (small) IDE drives, and I'm about to spend a lot of money on a larger one.
>What do you all know about IDE? What Experiences have you had? rumours you
>have heard? I think it's time to find out why this baby is so (apparently)
>cheap, fast, and simple.

Why they're cheap, I don't know.  My experiences with IDE have been nothing
but good.  These experiences range from installing a pair of Conner CP-3184's
in a Novell server to dinking around with them on Unix 386 systems.

The only thing one should worry about with respect to IDE is compatability. 
From what I have heardhow compatable your IDE drive is in your system depends
on who's IDE adaptor you use plus which manufacturer of IDE drive you go with.

Supposedly Conner, Imprimis (now a division of Seagate), and Maxtor are
dependable.  I can only attest for Conner.

ISC only certifies Imprimis and Rodime IDE drives to work under ISC 2.2, but I
have heard a number of people saying that Conner works with ISC, not
surprising to me.  I have also taken my Seagate ST151 and hooked it into a
WD1003-IWH (ST412/506 MFM to IDE board) and got ISC 2.0.2 to run off of that
without reformatting the drive.

The only thing to be weary of is compatability issues.  Don't try and run IDE
under Novell ELS Level I, it's not Novell certified.  Whether it works or not,
I don't know.  I try and stick with Novell certified configurations when
dealing with Netware.  I've also heard of some very idiosyncratic behavior of
IDE under SCO Xenix.  So again, be forewarned.  Best bet is to have a dealer's
guarantee that it will work otherwise they'll refund your money.  Only way to
be 125% though is to test it in the field.  IDE is NOT a replacement for
ST412/506 MFM.  It will work 99% of the time though.

>    Please please please somebody explain IDE drives... how do you low level
>    format them, anyways? Disk manufacturers obviously can do it....

You get a program that is aware of IDE drives.  Disk Manager 4.1 is aware of
IDE drives.  But make sure that the program is specifically aware of IDE
drives since it has to switch the drive into native mode and format it using
its actual drive geometry.

     // JCA

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