IDE Drives on UP2000 ?

["T. Weyergraf" <kirk@colinet.de>]

Hi all,

I am considering the use of a pair of IDE Harddrives in my UP2000, despite my strong
dislike of IDE in general 8-)
These won't be holding very busy filesystems, they will primarily be used as "data-graves",
like archives and the like.
Here are my questions:

- Are there any funny limits in size/cylinders/whatever, that could prevent the usage of
   *really* big drives like IBM's 75Gig part ? For cost/size effectiveness, I rather tend towards
    40-60Gigs.
- Are (U)DMA modes supported on Alpha ? I really do not want to waste CPU-cycles
   processing loads of interrupts in PIO mode.
- Are the IDE channels of the build-in Contaq 82c693 capable of handling a
   master/slave pair *each* or is the total max two drives ?
- Any general recommendations about which drives *not* to use ?

While asking funny questions anyway, here are two more not related to the above topic:

- Anybody ever tried using USB on the UP2000 ?
- I have seen some rumors about a new 21264 ( named 21264E ) with bigger ( L1 ? ) caches.
   Are there any pointers to more details, or is this the usual Net-FUD ? Searching
   Compaq/API/Digital did not yield anything at all. IIRC, I saw it mentioned on a site 
   called www.aceshardware.com.

Um. That's six questions in a single mail. I should leave the last bottle of beer untouched and
go to bed know ( or at least logout ).

8-)

Regards,
Thomas Weyergraf