16 Apr
2007
16 Apr
'07
3:03 a.m.
Rumor has it that Ethan Dicks may have mentioned these words:
Must be nice to live in a populous area, even if it is only
half-the-time... ;-)
How many of those could I get for $20 plus shipping? I could use (at least)
a couple for my SuperIDE interface for my CoCo that I'm repacking in a
Tandy 1000 RLX case. No, the guts didn't go to waste...
On 4/15/07, Roger Merchberger <zmerch-cctalk at
30below.com> wrote:
Ah, but a decade ago, "pundits" said the floppy was past it's prime...
I'll
admit that I actually have a computer that doesn't have one installed and I
don't really miss it (because I do have access to a USB floppy drive I use
on occasion) and my wife's machine doesn't have one either, but I recently
found the last floppy I made for her... a 720K DSDD ditty for MS-DOS which
still a) was readable and for the "too much info" crowd b) still had an
"e-loveletter" that I wrote to her on it before we were married... the disk
is over 15 years old; so she never really used 'em much to begin with.
PATA vs. SATA is merely an argument of the little board they stick on the
hardware, which both right now are being made in such quantity that they're
equal in price. Until there's no call for PATA upgrades (which might take
at least 1/2 decade, judging from the floppy's history) there will still be
SATA->PATA converters (which exist already in both directions) and so it's
just another seamless emulation layer to CF that really doesn't matter.
Maybe in 15 years we should start worrying, but by then the petabyte CF
cards will be available for your gigapixel DSLR... ;-)
Ah, but the beauty of this is, if you make it IDE
compatible, you already
*have* flash compatibility - just slap a CompactFlash module of your
preferred size into a CF->IDE adapter, and Bob's your uncle!
Since desktop drives are moving to SATA, compatibility with PATA (and
thus easily attached Compact Flash drives) isn't the obvious goal is
once was. Yes, there will be large amounts of PATA drives for a
number of years, but I can see that in a small number of years, they
just won't bother to make them anymore, whereas, Compact Flash is
Compact Flash - they may stop making that, too, but they aren't as
mechanically fragile, so they may be easier to track down 10+ years in
the future. but 1G CF
drives are not only plentiful (I have two on my
desk right now, for my Nikon D70) but now they're quite inexpensive.
The Micro Center has house-branded 1GB and 2GB CF cards for a few
bucks apiece as impulse buys in bins by the cash registers... right
where you'd expect to see gum and candy - if that isn't a sign of how
cheap they've become, what is? The real issue, though, one that the OP didn't
address directly, is
that if you are making a generic MFM drive emulator, you have no way
to know how much writing is going to take place, one task that IDE
drives have over Flash... If your target host doesn't swap, and
doesn't, say, write a magic sector every time you boot, or update
access times in the filesystem everytime you read a file, you could
probably get away with a Flash drive. If your target machine/OS
allows you to boot write-protected media, Flash could be a fine
choice. If, however, your OS requires a writeable drive and demands
swap space or does lots of filesystems writes outside of human
control, Flash might not be a wise choice, cheap or not.
Most of the non-sucky CF implementations (read: Sandisk/Lexar) have
built-in sector-writing-balancing (for lack of a useful term -- or a
still-functional pair of connected neurons ;-) - so a sufficiently large CF
card _could_ last a very long time even as swap on a classic system
(depending on a boatload of factors, and your definition of "very long" of
course... ;-) and IIRC, newer flash has an order of magnitude more write
cycles than the old stuff, but that just might be the beer talkin'.
I still need the AT keyboard interface for my CoCo repack - see an upcoming
wholly OT post that hopefully Jay won't kick my butt over on how I'm gonna
pay for that....
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |