> detecting the ghosting *before the reset* should't speed up the reset.
> If we have only one master, it will also handle registers read for the
> slave and both drives will appear ready at the same time.

I'm not sure what difference you think that makes.  Since we're
(typically) reading a status of all-0s at that point, the reset does
complete quickly, but we still try sending a command to the bogus
drive 1 and time out.