I understand about holding ones breath.
I`m from the "old school" and remember CLEARLY when 80MB drives were 1000 bucks and up. I still have my first HDD and controller combo from XT days. This HDD/controller combo normally retailed at 1100 bucks and I got it for 750 bucks when newer models began to come out. This was the ST-506 drive that boasted a whopping 5MB of storage and a MFM controller running at a 4:1 interleave. Data rates of this drive were a scalding 180KB/sec, below todays floppy rates. Now, one can buy 20GB drives for around the 100-120 mark that boast burst transfer rates of 16MB/sec or more.
With the cost of HDDs going thru the floor and performance creeping skyward, it wont be long that something will have to be done.
I saw on an obscure site in Australia where a couple of guys re-designed the IDE interface to handle 4 devices per port and also offered "combining" of all devices on a port. They were testing 4 20GB drives on one port that appeared to the O/S as one logical volume or 80GB. They claim performance double that of recent EIDE drives without loss of functionality or reliability. I`m trying to relocate this site as it was interesting and may bear fruit of their labors.
Iv`e tried "strapping" 2 SCSI drives and have limited sucess. My biggest drawback is how to enable cache on one drive and disable it on the other and then "switch" from one to another without the O/S getting wind of it.
I must of blown 20 EPROMS in trying to "reprogram" SCSI on the fly to achieve this.
This is the current state of my "old" barracuda drives. A few folks have "broke out" of the EIDE 80 pin interface to support 2 drives as one and one might expect a discovery in the coming months.
Many things are being tried but to date no real breakthroughs. Soon however, the PCI bus will become too slow for upcoming hardware and a change there will need to occur. To do this, the entire design of the PC would need to change.
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