Chris Holten wrote in a message to George Fliger:
 GF> Novell doesn't recommend IDE for their NOS.  You should really follow
 GF> their guidelines.
 CH> That's probably one of the growing number of reasons a very
 CH> large portion of Novell's customer base is moving on to
 CH> other more flexible NOS. Novell's methodology and attitude
 CH> is archaic. It's showing up quite well in thier financial
 CH> reports.
The problems of IDE have nothing to do with the particular operating system, 
and the same disadvantages of IDE are experienced with NT, OS/2, or any other 
truly multitasking operating system.  You do not see the IDE penalty with 
Windows 95 because it cannot multiplex I/O even if the hardware supports it.
 CH> However, IDE does now and has always worked just fine with
 CH> Novell, even ELS 2.X (with special drivers for largers than
 CH> 512meg drives). On 10BT and probably even small 100bt
 CH> networks it's probably a false economy to think you *have*
 CH> to have a busmaster SCSI setup to saturate a 10BT bandwith.
 CH> Of course if you are spending some one else's money and they
 CH> don't care....
The server will benefit enormously from SCSI, because it can offload 
processing to the controller and use the extra time to organize its cache, or 
even to do database serving.  The incremental cost of SCSI over IDE is 
minimal.
That said, the only disadvantage to IDE on NetWare (or NT) is speed.  It 
should work perfectly well, just less efficiently.
 CH> The Ultra DMA busmaster IDE drives will work with very
 CH> similiar performance to a good SCSI setup. Might be you want
 CH> to review the changes that have occurred in ATBUS drives
 CH> since 1991. You'll find it interesting.
This isn't quite true, and UltraDMA is being oversold.  It is an improvement 
over IDE, but it still doesn't free the processor the way SCSI does. 
Especially in protected mode, UltraDMA has no support for discontiguous 
sectoring, scatter-gather, and so on.  These are all important things in a 
file server, especially if you use advanced features such as mirroring or 
RAID.
 
-- Mike
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