Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: RagTimeBand who wrote (2663)	6/13/1998 5:34:00 PM
From: R2O	Respond to of 5944

adaptec.com then search for fire on the wire Can't say I've had to deal with it yet. The devil is in the details, which is usually the SW. That's because the real world is limited by real laws of physics. The SW world deals with the insanity of the human mind, for which there appears to be no limit or law. Transport speed is only a part of the system. Looks like firewire deals with some of the real world problems such as hot connects, etc. Might be worth looking into, but then I see a $ followed by lots of numbers with no decimal point and I know firewire peripherals and I are not ready for each other, at least on a personal basis. As to how fast discs can lay down bits, probably about 60 Mb/sec/head. Or is it 120 this year. Most(?) drives have one head/surface, but someone please correct me if that's not true this year. How many surfaces? 1? 4? 8? 16? These sure have been done in the past. Multiple heads per surface? Sure, why not. One could have a head carrier with 16 heads. (No ready reference.) The electronics (electrically) behind the head gets smaller, cooler, faster and cheaper every day. Might we have 100 heads/carrier? Sure. 1 Gb/sec/surface? Why not? (We then need only 2 surfaces to keep up with the 'new' TI technology) Things like this present only small (well, maybe not THAT small) technical challenge. Given the desire and a moderate budget and about (guess) 1.5 years, anything that is not impossible to do CAN be done. But what will you do with the 200MB/second coming from your disc via whatever interconnect? You sure can't ask your Host processor to deal with it. Much too fast. You may be able to manipulate pointers/descriptors to the data, but doing active ops on it? Probably not. You can't even sustain that rate into 'main' host memory with PCI. You need to design the entire system around fast data rates. The PC architecture probably doesn't fit. Especially if you intend to be demanding about 'real time'. If your picture of grandma skips a beat, probably not much harm. Other tasks are not so forgiving. If you want a real winner of a 'bus', it would be one that sets up transfers between devices and doesn't involve the 'Host'. SCSI permits this to limited extent. Maybe firewire does, for all I know. Also needs redundancy, local processing, etc., etc., etc. Hope your car doesn't 'blue screen' on the freeway.