Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 10:50:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@ref.tfs.com> To: mycroft@ai.mit.edu (Charles M. Hannum) Cc: dyson@Root.COM, sos@FreeBSD.org, paul@isl.cf.ac.uk, terry@cs.weber.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: NetBSD supports LBA and large (EIDE) drives Message-ID: <199505031750.KAA13325@ref.tfs.com> In-Reply-To: <199505031742.NAA09007@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> from "Charles M. Hannum" at May 3, 95 01:42:32 pm
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> According to Hale Landis, the guy who wrote 20-40% of the ATA std, LBA > is inmature and buggy, even more so considering that it is not needed > for anything. > > The problems that Hale has noted are entirely on the software end -- > that there is little or no standardization about how the BIOS converts > beetween C/H/S addresses and LBAs. This is only an issue when sharing > a disk with another OS, or when booting from it, and is analagous to > the standard geometry translation compatibility problems. You know, FreeBSD can exist on the same disk as other OS's. > LBA mode is not `needed' for IDE drives smaller than 8GB. However: And nobody has been insane enough to make a 8GB+ IDE drive yet. > 1) In practice, the differences between BIOS LBA implementations seem > to be less annoying than the differences between BIOS C/H/S > implementations. Well, you're in for a surprise then... > 2) There are already 9GB SCSI drives on the market, and the antiquated > C/H/S addressing is not capable of supporting a drive that large. But no IDE's in sight... (because most PC's don't do LBA so the market isn't there. Furthermore people with that kind of storage req's tend to prefer SCSI anyway...) > 3) LBA mode is *required* for ATAPI devices (i.e. EIDE CD-ROMs). ATAPI is "SCSI over ATA" and is an entirely different beast anyway. > What I really don't understand is why people are flaming at me about > this. We're not flaming anybody... -- Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@login.dknet.dk> -- TRW Financial Systems, Inc. 'All relevant people are pertinent' && 'All rude people are impertinent' => 'no rude people are relevant'
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