re ide vs scsi in article wayne uv amtower spacecoast org wayne amtower spacecoast orgx newssoftware grn f by mike schwartz michael b smith writes but i still want to know why it intrinsically better than ide on an isa bus when it comes to multi tasking os s when managing data from a single scsi hard drive a scsi controller that transfers data by dma allows the cpu to request data from the hard drive and continue working while the controller gets the data and moves it to memory ide also uses dma techniques i believe floppy controller also uses dma and most a d boards also use dma dma is no big deal and has nothing to do directly with scsi for example when rewinding or formatting a tape the command is issued to the controller and the bus is released to allow access to other devices on the bus this greatly increases productivity or at least do something else while backing up your hard drive which happens to be what i am doing while reading this group you can thank your software for that if dos had a few more brains it could format floppies etc while you were doing something else the hardware will support it but dos at least won t again this has nothing to do with scsi its a long story but i still use ide on my except for the cdrom which thanks to scsi i can move between both machines if and when scsi is better standardized and supported on the ibm clone machines i plan to completely get rid of ide and if you stick with dos you ll wonder why you can t multitask again i ask why can t a unix or os type os do all the miraculous things with an ide harddrive that it can with a single scsi hard drive
