On Monday 02 December 2002 04.52, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
Hmm... didn't want to quote so much, but I don't see a good place to snip. This falls into the "just enough knowledge to get into trouble" category. So, um... what is the significance? Why would I want to make one choice or the other? What grave consequences wil befall if I opt in one direction, and what grand vistas of convenience and opportunity will open up, if opt for the other way?
The only reason I can see for having a read-only cd player as ide-scsi is that some cd recording programs only use scsi. So if you want to copy CDs from that cd player to your recorder in that program, it needs to be ide-scsi as well. For all other purposes, it's better to have it as a regular ide device, if only because the hardware config tools such as hdparm only work on the ide device if it's an ide piece of hardware. I prefer finding a program that can handle an IDE cd reader, but if your program of choice - xcdroast perhaps? - only handles scsi, then your reader needs to be ide-scsi. The reason for all this nonsense is a couple of seriously silly decisions by the kernel hackers, but according to popular mythology it should be sorted in 2.5, so once kernel 2.6 gets released we shouldn't have to mess with ide-scsi any more.
Why would it matter that one device is ide-scsi if the other is, as well? Conflict? Convenience? Is there an overhead/speed penalty for the conversion/pretense?
I'm not sure if there is a speed difference between ide-scsi and regular ide. If there is it's small enough not to be noticed - by me at least.