27 Feb
2002
27 Feb
'02
9:02 a.m.
Dave,
I started putting together a similar system. I'm using a Compaticard IV
in mine. You can set it to be the second floppy controller and it will
handle four drives in addition to the two on the built-in floppy
controller. You can also boot from any drive on the Compaticard. In
addition, it can handle 8" drives and has a port for external drives. If
that's not enough I believe that you can also add MORE compaticards to the
same system and add four more drives per card!
Joe
At 12:22 PM 2/27/02 -0800, you wrote:
I'm putting together an old 486 system, one of
whose main purposes will be to
read/write floppies of several formats. Like 5.25" 360K, 720K, 1.2M,
RX50,
etc.,
and 3.5" 720K and 1.44M. I also want to be able
to copy RX50s disk to
disk on
the appropriate drive type.
So I figure it'll take 4 drives (or maybe 3 drives where one is a
3.5"/5.25"
combo). All of these would be in one enclosure.
The question is, how to do this without having to unplug/plug drives every
time you want to make a configuration change? It would be nice to just be
able to throw a switch or two to re-configure. Not having to get into the
enclosure would be nice, too.
I've thought of two ways to do it, but I'm not sure they'll work, or if there
might not be a better way.
1) Plug all the drives into one control cable and switch on/off the power
to the drives to select them.
2) Plug all the drives into one control cable and select the drives by
switching a control line on the control cable.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave
--
David C. Jenner
djenner(a)earthlink.net