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Technology Stocks : Adaptec (ADPT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark who wrote (2155)	5/13/1998 7:58:00 PM
From: Joy from LA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5944

Adaptec and the new Merced chip (code for Intel's new chip in development). I understand that Adaptec is not supporting 1394. And that Adaptec will be a beneficiary of Intel's new Merced chip. Does anyone know about this?

To: Mark who wrote (2155)	5/14/1998 8:04:00 AM
From: Starowl	Respond to of 5944

All: Interesting article on Fibre Channel/SCSI. techweb.com For investors chagrinned at the obvious move of Adaptec stock to the penny range :-), and potential buyers gleefully looking for that bottom, and traders just messing around with the stock, greetings. I, gloomily resting in the first category, know that everything's going to be OK. Starowl

To: Mark who wrote (2155)	5/14/1998 4:27:00 PM
From: Torben Noerup Nielsen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5944

Mark, I'm actually not a raging bull; I just happen to like the company. I'm quite worried about the amount of money I have on the line (in excess of $100K) given what has been happening. Q1. What will be the best HDD interfaces in the near future for - a) inside the box where cost is an issue ? I really do not disagree with you there. That one is pretty clear. However, I do disagree when you imply that IDE performance will catch up somehow. I just do not think that is technically possible. There's also a hefty CPU penalty which no one seems able to do anything about. Then again, there are reasons why few seem to notice it.... Everything comes down to throughput. For quite some time now, two of the main differences between workstations and PCs have been memory architecture and disk controllers. Even though PCs have had the same clock speeds, they have often run slower and that is largely due to those two items. Slowly the PC makers are cleaning up their memory architecture and you feel the performance improvements. They are also improving their disk controllers. Yes, the UDMA controllers now commonly used are certainly an improvement and I won't knock them for single user systems like PCs running Windows 95. But when you are running NT, the picture does look a little different since you really need not just disk size, but also throughput - preferably without driving the processor to its knees - and there SCSI currently wins. I'm still choking on one comment of yours: >At a similar price to one high performance SCSI drive you could have >two fast IDE drives, and provided the driver software is good enough >you'd get better performance and higher capacity for no extra cost. Is that really the case? I simply do not believe that it is quite so simple a software issue.... It's not the drivers that are the problem; it's the architecture. By the way, all of this is likely to become moot with IIO. If that succeeds, then the interface to the actual disks can be hidden behind special purpose processors. A major intent behind IIO is to off-load I/O tasks from the CPU. That one could certainly hurt Adaptec's SCSI business. Anyway, I'm really not an Adaptec bull under all circumstances, but I do like their products. I've never found another vendor who could provide me with SCSI controllers of a consistent high quality. And I've probably tried them all over time. I'm using past and current quality as a way to gauge future performance. And I just happen to like the direction the company is going. Which does not mean that I like the way the stock price is heading right now! Thanks, Torben