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Date:      Sat, 15 Aug 1998 11:53:23 +0000
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: TESTERS WANTED for new ATAPI CD/CDR/CDRW driver. 
Message-ID:  <199808151153.LAA01317@word.smith.net.au>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 15 Aug 1998 11:30:50 MST." <199808151830.LAA05540@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> 

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> On Sat, 15 Aug 1998 09:33:09 +0000 
>  Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> wrote:
>  > For what it's worth, I don't see much value in treating ATA disks as 
>  > though they were SCSI disks; the overhead in translation is probably 
>  > too high.  On the other hand, I'm less sure about things that use the 
>  > ATAPI packet protocol.
> 
> Considering that even SCSI command passthrough works on many ATAPI
> disks and CD-ROMS, it really is the right thing to do, and we have
> had a LOT of success doing it this way in NetBSD.

I'd be curious to know if anyone's measured the cost of the SCSI<->ATA
translation for ATA disks, since that's where performance is really an 
issue.  Nobody cares how efficient access to a Zip disk is, but an 
extra 10% overhead on ATA disk transactions would really hurt.

Command passthrough doesn't (can't) work directly, as many fields are 
different sizes.  I think what you mean is that there's no need for any 
intelligence in the translation, which is fair enough.

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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