29 Feb
2008
29 Feb
'08
5:51 p.m.
On Friday 29 February 2008, Doc Shipley wrote:
tiggerlasv at aim.com wrote:
Forgive me if this is a silly question, but is 10MB a limitation
of the firmware and drivers, or of the disk technology?
Well, RL02s are 10MB. There's no reason that you couldn't have
something on the same interface with more tracks (the only real
difference between the RL01 and RL02 were the number (and thus width)
of tracks on a cartridge).
The biggest problem would just be that the appropriate drivers wouldn't
expect to see anything other than an 5MB or 10MB disk. It probably
wouldn't be too hard to patch the drivers for a larger (fixed) size,
but I think most people just want a "drop in place with existing
software & drivers" solution.
I'll note that there were third-party controllers which took a cheap
ST506-like (or whatever) disk and emulated multiple RL02s to the host.
Actually, I think that's pretty much what the DSD880 (which I have one
of) does. However, it's probably a whole lot less useful to emulate a
bunch of tiny disks than one big disk, at least for most people. Now,
if there were only software RAID drivers for RT-11 et al, you could
combine those back into one big disk. :)
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
You
could have, for example, four RL02s each capable of being
assigned a "pack" from the card.
What were the biggest non-MSCP-attached drives?
How hard would they be to emulate?
While RL02's would probably be easy to emulate,
at 10MB a pop, you don't get alot of bang for your buck.