Q-bus to CF [was: IOmega]

[Dave McGuire]

On Feb 28, 2008, at 12:19 AM, tiggerlasv at aim.com wrote:
> I stopped holding my breath for creation of a Q-Bus IDE
> controller a long time ago.   While I like to think that I
> do a reasonable job troubleshooting some problems,
> I'm definitely not a hardware/software engineer.

   It has been done.  Chuck Dickman did one, I think.  It's actually  
really easy...device drivers are the hard part.

> It would have been nice, but it makes more sense
> these days to go Q-Bus to SATA.  I would imagine
> that it would be alot less hassle, and certainly alot less
> real estate on the board, with the smaller connectors,
> and fewer traces.

   Ohhh noonono.  The only similarity between ATA and SATA is three  
letters in the acronym.  SATA is a very intelligent, very complex,  
and VERY VERY FAST connection.  That's so far beyond "impractical"  
that I don't even want to think about it.

> If you can do Q-bus to Compact Flash, then you can do
> Q-bus to IDE, because CF *is* an IDE interface.
> Those wonderful CF to IDE adapter boards generally don't
> have any circuitry on-board, except to drive status LED's.

   Well, not exactly, but CF is *mostly* IDE (ATA).  For nearly all  
applications, they are interchangeable.  One difference that comes to  
mind is that CF is required to implement 8-bit transfer modes while  
ATA is not.  This is immaterial in most situations, but I thought it  
might be a good idea to mention it.

> I could see no discernable speed increase between
> using real SCSI drives, and the IDE <> CF adapter,
> although I wasn't trying to do any significant benchmarking.
> (The CQD-200's are kind of poky controllers anyway,
> so this didn't really surprise me.)

   They are??  I thought they were among the fastest Qbus SCSI  
adapters available.

           -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL