Many of the comments here casting doubt on the complexity of IDE have me wondering how many of you mainly worked with drives you bought new. The author touches

Many of the comments here casting doubt on the complexity of IDE have me wondering how many of you mainly worked with drives you bought new. The author touches on it briefly, but jumper settings were not obviously nor consistently labelled. (Same goes for geometry which was also needed.) If you didn't have the documentation that came with the drive then you had to go hunting on BBSes or FTP sites (if you had access to the Internet) for the information. Resorting to trial-and-error when you couldn't find that particular drive model in any of the text files. The author also doesn't go into how some jumper blocks were not merely bridging pairs of pins, but had configurations with jumpers at right angles to each other. Which I assume may have been a resister array, but it could also have been dummy positions used to prevent you from losing the jumper you might need later. ATAPI solved a lot of problems of course, but came with some of its own. Notably that if the drive, BIOS, and OS couldn't all agree the wouldn't do DMA. I recall Windows 95 bug that erroneously dropped the hard drive into PIO mode and made everything slow to a crawl.