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1996-07-10
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Number: A4TH071890U149 and F3TH072390U179
Subject: Information on IDE Drives
Date: August 1, 1990
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GENERAL
INFORMATION: IDE is an abbreviation for Integrated Device Electronics.
Basically, it is a controller like the WD1003 integrated on
the hard drive. A forty pin cable connects either directly
to the signals on the system board or to an adapter card
that fits in a bus slot. One drive (LXT200A by Maxtor) has
been certified with the ISADISK driver.
A further note on IDE drives. They were originally
developed by Conner & Compaq, and are usually 3.5 inch
format. They are becoming quite popular in workstations,
because they don't need a seperate disk controller. Some
IDE drives are "intelligent", have built-in HOT FIX, and
often come low-level preformatted from the factory. You
need to be aware that with these intelligent IDE drives,
formatting them under COMPSURF can ruin them! This includes
some Miniscribe drives, but not Compaq's and IBM's.
The IDE drives' built-in controller is theoretically ISA
(WD) - compatible. So use the ISA driver. Sometimes this
doesn't work and you get an error message from NETGEN,
COMPSURF, etc., about the drive type number being out of
range. In that case, use the new updated version of ISADISK
from NetWire, which usually seems to fix the problem.
The problem with IDE drives is the very fact that they all
have their own controller. So a server which works with one
IDE drive, could fail if another one is swapped into its
place. We haven't heard of any problems with 386 and IDE
drives, but then that's probably because most of them only
go up to about 100MB, so they don't get put in 386 servers.
(X) This information was verified verbally.
(X) This information was verified in the lab.