SoftRAID on IDE: Yes or no

A statement on the SoftRAID web site reads: "Q. Does SoftRAID support IDE devices? A. Not at this time. SoftRAID was designed for SCSI drives, including SCSI, SCSI-2 and SCSI-3. SoftRAID is compatible with any read/write device that uses the SCSI Manager. IDE is very different technology to SCSI, and SoftRAID ignores IDE devices when scanning the SCSI bus. We are working on IDE support for SoftRAID, but do not have a release date set." In contrast, a statement from VST quoted on MacFixIt reads: "I put a pair of IDE 45GB Deskstars into a G4, ran SoftRAID and the read speeds benchmarked at 64MB per second (sustained)!" As these statements appeared to be contradictory, MacFixIt reader Eugene Nichols queried SoftRaid as to whether SoftRAID can be used to create arrays with IDE drives, or not. He received this reply: "Both statements are true. The VST card emulates SCSI, so while not as fast, it makes IDE drives capable of getting decent performance. ATA does not support concurrent IO's, so RAID on IDE is either the same speed or slower. It is not faster. That is why we never supported it. You need two independent buses, with special caching/buffering capability to squeeze anything out of IDE." Update; Rob Art Morgan (of Bare Feats) adds: "You can create a striped array of IDE drives with any PCI based Ultra ATA controller (VST, Acard, etc.) because it 'appears' to Mac OS as a SCSI bus. (It won't work with Apple's internal IDE interface for obvious reasons.) I was actually testing the new IBM 75GXP drives this week. I got a pair of them in a striped array to go 68MB/sec in sustained READ and 43MB/sec in sustained write (on a G4/400 Sawtooth). But to get that speed, I had to use dual controller cards - one for each drive. That's what SoftRAID folks mean when they said 'you need two independent buses.' You can run separate cables on a single Ultra ATA card (since they come with two ports) but the speed drops dramatically. The big advantage of creating an IDE striped array is cost. An Ultra2 SCSI card and dual Ultra2 SCSI drives cost twice as much as a similarly configured Ultra ATA/66 array."