20 Oct
2006
20 Oct
'06
10:27 a.m.
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:51:00 -0700
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
Subject: Re: Wow; $192 for a 5.25" floppy disk drive
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID: <453774B4.25279.812F7FE at cclist.sydex.com>
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On 19 Oct 2006 at 14:16, Jules Richardson wrote:
They're a bit more expensive (about $5 in quantity) but the
MC9S12UF32 looks interesting. It has a built-in USB interface (in
addition to the SCI serial interface) and a built-in ATA-5 interface.
I'm not sure what one would use the latter for in this application,
but the built-in USB interface would be nice if one wanted to build a
unit with both serial and USB interfaces to the host.
It would require considerably more software development, but another
interesting possibility might be to have an ethernet interface and
build the disk drive as a network storage/reading device. The
MC9S12NE64 has an ethernet MAC and EPHY built-in as well as the more
common SCI.
And of course, they both have plenty of extra horsepower.
Jeff Walther
I don't think you necessarily need anything
like that much; I remember Dave
Dunfield and I discussing this a while back and it worked out at something
like a couple of hundred KB I'm sure.
If you're going track-by-track, probably a couple hundred K is more
than enough. But holding a complete 8" DSHD image runs to something
like 6MB if you hang onto the whole histogram.
I think you'd definitely want to have enough storage to hold a
complete image--it'd make copying much simpler, no? Besides, a few
megabytes of RAM is nothing nowadays.
I don't know, what's a couple of hundred
KB of memory, a CPU (say a Z80 for
sake of argument), a bit of ROM, and a serial interface chip, plus a bit of
glue logic?
Probably use something a bit more common, say an ARM? Not that I
have anything against a Z80 (or Z180, or EZ80). Just that extra
horsepower can be very nice, even if you don't need it right away.