21 Apr
2012
21 Apr
'12
11:19 p.m.
On 04/21/2012 08:49 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
I made the same transition for the most part, but kept
my Zip disks around, and have recently started to collect some more. I'm planning to
use them on PDP-11s as removable boot media. -Dave
Funny,
as the OP I asked for the ZIP drive spec in order to be able to use them as a replacement
for the old, slow & unreliable 10 MB cartridge drive for my ETH Lilith.
Those zips are, despite their faults, the closests thing to it, still available in
plentiful supply. CF cards just doesn't seem right.
Switching from the original drive to IDE or ATAPi drives involves writing new bitslice
microcode. Difficult without the right spec, but as pointed out the 8070 spec and Linux
driver source do go a long way in explaining things. IDE version works now, with a
CHS-addressed harddisk. Atapi version still no luck
W.r.t. reliability : I killed a perfectly good ZIP disk by misaligning the LBA addresses.
Writing blocks on totally different addresses was not to its liking ( and noisy ) ,
although this should of course be possible. A corrected programs read and wrote
consecutive blocks without issue, on a new ZIP disk.
Jos