2 Dec
2003
2 Dec
'03
5:24 p.m.
Let's start a project to develop a black-box for ST506, SMD and ...
replacement!
We need some hardware freaks on one side and of course some software
freaks too.
Similar stuff has been done. Have a look at:
http://www.chd.dyndns.org/qbus_ide/
Andreas
Tony Duell wrote:
On Mon,
2003-12-01 at 16:32, Andreas Holz wrote:
I'd rather have one interface/drive per system. It could probably fit in
place of the existing drive (certainly on machines like the PERQ where
there's plenty of space round the hard disk), and would mean the machine
stays self-contained.
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
All the signals on the interface connectors are digital, but the data is
the 'raw' data from the head, not packed into nice sectors and bytes
(doing that is the job of the controller). So the timing is, to some
extent, analogue.
However, suppose the data rate is something like 5MHz (I think that's
right for ST506). If you sampled the data output from the controller at,
say, 50MHz, wrote the pattern of 0's and 1's to the new hard disk (OK,
very wasteful of disk space, but then we're proposing replacing a 20Mbyte
sisk with a 20Gbyte one or something :-)), and then turned the data on
the new disk back into a 50MHz signal that you fed back to the
controller, I think it would work. Might be interesting to try, anyway...
-tony