Organization: Computing Laboratory, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE1 7RU.
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In article <1992Nov17.191546.25855@mksol.dseg.ti.com>, mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>Doesn't the CPU have to be involved in telling an IDE controller what
>to do anyway? Given that, what exactly is happening in parallel? Or
>do they put a secondary CPU on an IDE when it's set up to do caching?
>If so (and I suspect that it IS so), *that* is where your extra speed
>is coming from with a caching IDE drive.
I think we've got a crossed line. I'm talking about an IDE caching CONTROLLER with a built in 80188 processor and 1Mb RAM built in . When writing the main CPU passes the data down the bus to the drive as usual, but doesn't have to wait for the physical disk write because it goes (assuming it's less than 1Mb) into the cache controller's RAM. The main processor can then carry on, the 80188 puts the data on the drive in the 'background'
