Biggest problem with the parachute solution is the user. Normal people don't know which side of the building it would be better to jump from given the wind, don't known how to deal with deployment issues, don't know to see and avoid obstacles like wires between buildings etc, don't know how to steer, don't know how to land. It would be broken legs, arms, backs and heads as well as a proportion of dead bodies and they would be scattered all around the buildings. Then there would be the interesting winds setup be buildings on fire, just to make things interesting.

I've seen these before, but haven't seen enough to convince met that it is useful.

Things they I think would be good are tagged command queueing, getting an IRQ or two back from my ide controllers, especially when I am already using a SCSI controller.

I'm not sure whether SCSI bus contention will be better or worse than IDE master/slave contention when I want to do raid 0+1 over 4 drives.

And then there is the whole Serial ATA thing, coming soon to a store near me.

If I'd seen these converters a few years ago, and they were a reasonable price, then they would have been worth the investment. Now SATA is added to the mix.