Mmm... I lead a somewhat sheltered life here at times, so perhaps somebody out there can tell me if this (below) is normal or not.

I have an ATA ("IDE") controller in my desktop box here that I'm writing drivers for, and have a small arsenal of high speed hardware to plug onto it.

Here's some of the stranger (to me, normal?) things I've been torture testing it with:

1. Two high-speed CD-RW drives (24X and 48X) on a single cable, both writing CD-Rs simultaneously at 20-30X.

2. One high speed CD-RW writing at 48X while watching a movie on a DVD-RAM drive, on the same cable at the same time.

3. A high speed tagged queuing IBM Deskstar harddrive, doing a full image backup at the same time as watching a movie on the DVD-RAM, on the same cable as the Deskstar drive.

4. One high speed CD-RW writing at 48X while dumping my entire root disk to a Deskstar drive on the same cable as the CD-RW.

This all works fairly smoothly, with only the VERY rare glitch in playback/recording.

Needless to say, this is under Linux.

???