🚀 go-pugleaf

gt4148b@prism.gatech.edu (Stephen Carter Morgan) writes:
>jfw@proteon.com (John Woods) writes:
>>However, Mac drive vendors usually have two associated costs that the PC
>>drive vendors do not have (which _really_ has to make you wonder about US
>>PC vendors!):
>Why would these things make us wonder about US PC vendors?

Because the US PC vendors sell LESS for MORE money.  Oh, I'm sorry, you're
a PC fan, perhaps I should have typed that more slowly.

>A MOUNTING KIT?  Those are $5 for PC's, and most PC's don't need them.
>They're only for putting a 3.5" hard drive in a 5.25" bay.  Otherwise, you
>just screw the new drive into place into one of the internal 3.5" bays.

The mounting kit is a bracket which DROPS INTO the Mac's disk drive slot.
(Mac drives are usually shipped already in the bracket.)  I've installed
quite a number of drives in both PCs and Macs, and frankly, I appreciate
the Mac not wasting my time.

Note that high-quality PC systems (like Compaqs), marketed to people whose
time is worth something, have similar brackets.

>PC users don't rely on the adapter's built-in driver.  Most get by just fine
>using FDISK (partitioning) and FORMAT in DOS.

Hot dang, you don't even know a blessed thing about the PC, and here you're
holding forth on its superiority over the Mac!  Here's a CLUE:  neither FDISK
nor FORMAT has _anything_ to do with the details of reading and writing disks
on the PC.  PC hard disks do NOT have driver code written on them.  The PC
hard disk driver is part of the BIOS (Basic I/O System), and the ROMs which
contain the appropriate part of the BIOS are on the SCSI adapter card.
(Except, of course, for PCs where the SCSI chip is on the motherboard[*];
then the SCSI BIOS will be in the BIOS chips on the motherboard.)

On the Mac, one of the early partitions on a drive contains driver code,
so that the SCSI driver in ROM can be very simple and small.  This also
enables extremely clever formatting software to custom-tailor the driver
to individual disk drives, at a modest RAM penalty.

> Why should Apple not include a utility to 
> format ALL hard disks into System 7.5?

They should, but they don't.[**]  Mac disk vendors would still need to ensure
that they ship driver code on the disk works with older versions of the System
software, so they'd still have to ship driver code and formatting programs.


[*] Assuming the SCSI chip works!  There are some PCs where the advertising
says the motherboard has SCSI built-in, and sure enough, there's an NCR
SCSI chip on the board -- but it isn't electrically connected to anything.
A $5 chip buys them a marketing checkbox, and their customers get shafted.
I love the PC marketplace!

[**] At this point, I assume they're just trying not to pull the rug out from
under the third-party driver manufacturers.  I find it hard to believe that
there's a significant number of people who refuse to go anywhere but Apple
for drive upgrades...