Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-06-04, 23:24:
MKE 2X wasn't low end in 1994. It was mid-range. In 1993 ANY CD-ROM drive was considered a luxury.
Why do people keep plugging MKE drives into IDE interfaces? You'd think after 25 years of telling them not to, they'd stop.
I noticed a flood of posts here on VOGONS recently of people asking questions to which answers are readily available if you invest 5 minutes of your time.
I referred to the MKE based drives as "low end" based on my personal experience of them being the most affordable 2x option (MPC-2 compliant) where I lived when I got one in late 1994 . There were likely still 1x drives on the market at that point, not that I cared as, AFAICR, they were perceived by myself and my entourage as being thoroughly obsolete at that point . I guess one could argue that a 1x drive by then would have been be considered the actual low end of the CD-ROM market . That said, going back to 2X and faster drives, DMA capable proprietary drive/interface combos such as the Mitsumi CRMC-FX001D were a thing in 1994 as were SCSI units from the likes of NEC. From a performance perspective, there may well have been slower 2x drives than the CR-562B/CR-563B, but at least where I lived, I do not recall there being cheaper ones (MKE interface drives from a company/brand called NSA were also a thing, though I do not recall them being significantly cheaper).
As for MKE drives wrongfully being assumed to be ATAPI, I guess it's a symptom of "if the connector fits, it must be compatible fallacy syndrome" of which this https://i.stack.imgur.com/VYBcN.jpg is an extreme satire . That said, while I understand why MKE might have wanted to reuse readily available 40-pin cables and connectors for their proprietary interface, it was definitely a double-edged sword and bound to generate confusion, especially in the early days of ATAPI .