ATA was more than fine for what most people were doing. SCSI, even if you discount issues such as CPU consumption, as you say: bad before UDMA, not so bad afterwards, SCSI always had advantages over PATA IDE, if for no other reason that in had a more powerful command spec, and most esoteric drive specs (EG, the AV, deffered thermal recallibration beasties) were SCSI only. That meant that off-the-shelf, a Mac was more ready for audio/visual work than a PC. Large companies with IT departments capable of speccing PCs to specific requirements wouldn't have cared, but for small independant production houses, Macs had an edge.egbert wrote: What I was trying to convay was that I don't think Apple has had any kind of edge on the hardware level since the early days of PowerPC when for a short time the 601 was definitely faster than the 486s of that era.
ATA33 was not a bad spec BTW - it was plenty fast enough for drives of that era. What has made ATA drives fast and efficient is A)the spectacular increase in data density and the increase in rotational speed of drive media and B)DMA protocols - eg UDMA.
I guess what I was trying to convey is that Apple had a habit of bringing interesting, and occassionally high end, technologies to their base models. That those technologies (Firewire for example) may often lose whatever advantages they once had as the Intel market simply commodotizes the alternative into a standard is by the by.
It's an ongoing VHS/Betamax war, and Apple seem to always pick Betamax.
