1 Dec
2003
1 Dec
'03
4:37 a.m.
ST-506 does have some nasty hardware elements.
If your using the ISA bus, clearly a controller-level emulation using an
ATA drive is the
way to go here.
But if your ST-506 controller uses some other bus the situation changes
dramatically.
For SCSI, its an all-digital interface with available controller chips,
so a SCSI to
ATA emulation seems practical. For older Sun machines, a SASI to ATA
adapter
also seems reasonable.
But directly emulating the ST-506 interface? I'll pass on that job!
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 16:32, Andreas Holz wrote:
Hello all,
I would like to see a substitution of the now rapidly dying
MFM/SMD-disks. I would appreciate if I could swap out a defective
Maxtor-XT/ drive, and an IDE-drive into my Symbolics or PDP simply by
connecting the "black-box" to the existing cables.
Agreed. Or given the capacity of modern (ish) IDE/SCSI drives versus old
hardware, being able to host several virtual drives on one physical one
would be interesting, not waste drive space, and make it trivial to back
systems up.
Several machines' drive controllers could be interfaced across a network
to one host. The "black-boxes" would talk ST506 on one side and ethernet
on the other, say.
Interesting idea anyway... but given the nature of ST506 is it feasible?
Doesn't ST506 have analogue elements to the interface, and a tight
relationship to the host controller with which the drive was formatted?
cheers
Jules