re ide vs scsi in article c i fx fc ucdavis edu ez rocky ucdavis edu the great randalli writes can anyone explain in fairly simple terms why if i get os i might need an scsi controler rather than an ide will performance suffer that much for a mb or so drive if i don t have a tape drive or cd rom any help would be appreciated richard randall ez hamlet ucdavis edu there is a way in which a multi tasking computer actually gives you more cpu power then you had before and that is with i o overlap with i o overlap your cpu can continue to think while disk operations are underway whereas without overlap your cpu sits idly waiting for each disk operation to finish and disk operations take an eternity compared to a fast cpu so when you ve got multi tasking you want to increase performance by increasing the amount of overlapping you do one way is with dma or bus mastering either of these make it possible for i o devices to move their data into and out of memory without interrupting the cpu the alternative is for the cpu to move the data there are several scsi interface cards that allow dma and bus mastering ide however is defined by the standard at interface created for the ibm pc at which requires the cpu to move all the data bytes with no dma richard krehbiel richk grebyn com os will do for me until amigados for the comes along
