Talk:Parallel ATA/Archives/2014/June

Dubious

"When the CD-ROM was developed, many computers would have been unable to accept these drives if they had been ATA devices, due to already having two hard drives installed. Adding the CD-ROM drive would have required removal of one of the drives." I don't remember PCs generally having two hard drives. This needs citation or removal. Sounds like pure speculation to me, like someone wrote this just for the sake of writing something. 54.240.196.169 (talk) 09:32, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

My memory is that most systems used Super IO cards with 2 IDE ports, each IDE port supporting 2 devices. But CD drives and hard drives often didn't mix well on the same IDE cable due to poor implementation of the IDE standard on the interface card and on the drives themselves. So usually one or two hard drives went on one port/cable and the CD drive went on the other port/cable. I certainly remember having to use more than one hard drive due to the small capacity they had.  Stepho  talk  14:57, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Hm, back at the time (which I remember very well :) not many PCs had two HDDs, regardless of whether a PC was custom built or picked from a shelf. Yes, HDDs were small but they were more expensive than today, so only a small percentage of PCs had more than one HDD. Thus, my vote goes to deleting that "already having two hard drives installed" statement. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 17:00, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Those ISA Super-IO cards only had one IDE port, two port cards or two onboard ports only came up with PCI (or VLB) and the Pentium age. At least, that's my memory from building quite a few computers in the 90s. Just google for "ISA Super IO" images; two IDE port ISA cards are rare and came late. Zac67 (talk) 19:39, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

You're totally right, just have a look at the manual for this ISA I/O controller card, which had one IDE port with two HDDs supported in master/slave configuration. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:02, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Counter example of an ISA card with both primary and secondary IDE ports: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Data-Technology-Corp-16-Bit-ISA-I-O-Controller-Card-DTC2280-/261495234528?pt=US_Internal_Port_Expansion_Cards&hash=item3ce2549fe0

Obviously different cards supported different combinations. Possibly I worked on more powerful systems while you worked on more affordable systems. And all of us are probably using selective memory :) For most systems that I upgraded to a bigger hard drive, I typically reused the old drive as a second drive - like you said, hard drives were too expensive to throw away.  Stepho  talk  00:14, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

There's no FDD port on this I/O controller card? Well, that's a bit weird, as it was pretty much common to have an FDD port back at the time. :) Bringing back old memories, I've seen old PCs with two IDE HDDs, though one of them was a Pentium with PCI bus what's a different league. :)

However, I still think that we should remove the "most PCs having two HDDs" statement, as back at the time there were much more affordable than powerful systems, as it's always the case. :) Of course, instead we can say that "some of PCs had two HDDs", if you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:10, 15 June 2014 (UTC)