Re: AEHD drives available (was: Re: AEHD drive)

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

nobody@wavetech.net (Greg Buchner) wrote:

>supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:
>
>> Apple wanted you to buy their SCSI hard
>> drives for your Mac rather than third party ones.
>
>Not really true...it was more of a performance issue.  With a driver
>written especially for that particular HD, you could get much better
>performance.  I have noticed this with a drive I had originally formatted
>with a patched version of Apple HD SC Setup that I later reformatted
>with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit at a friends.  Read/write performance jumped
>about 30-50% depending on the size of the block data read.  Macintoshes
>were a performance based machine so things like this were important.
>Besides, from what I always remember, third party HD's usually had
>formatting software of some sort thrown in and were usually cheaper
>than Apple's HD's.

Performance was important for IIGS users too.  That's why
third party controllers have their own drivers (RamFAST and
Focus, for example).  But that does not mean Apple had
to cripple ADU or the IIGS generic SCSI hard drive driver.
It is because they left the generic drivers open on the IIGS
that we can use Iomega Zip and Jazz drives.

Maybe that's why Apple has such a hard time declaring
the IIGS obsolete.  It remains useful.  In the case of black
and white Macs, it is much more difficult to support on the
user level without Apple's blessings.