Wow; $192 for a 5.25" floppy disk drive - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

20 Oct 2006

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 Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:51:00 -0700
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
Subject: Re: Wow; $192 for a 5.25" floppy disk drive
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
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Message-ID: <453774B4.25279.812F7FE at cclist.sydex.com>
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On 19 Oct 2006 at 14:16, Jules Richardson wrote:

   I don't think you necessarily need anything
like that much; I remember Dave
  Dunfield and I discussing this a while back and it worked out at something
  like a couple of hundred KB I'm sure. 
If you're going track-by-track, probably a couple hundred K is more
than enough.  But holding a complete  8" DSHD image runs to something
like 6MB if you hang onto the whole histogram.

I think you'd definitely want to have enough storage to hold a
complete image--it'd make copying much simpler, no?  Besides, a few
megabytes of RAM is nothing nowadays.

   I don't know, what's a couple of hundred
KB of memory, a CPU (say a Z80 for
  sake of argument), a bit of ROM, and a serial interface chip, plus a bit of
  glue logic? 
Probably use something a bit more common, say an ARM?  Not that I
have anything against a Z80 (or Z180, or EZ80).  Just that extra
horsepower can be very nice, even if you don't need it right away. 
They're a bit more expensive (about $5 in quantity) but the 
MC9S12UF32 looks interesting.   It has a built-in USB interface (in 
addition to the SCI serial interface) and a built-in ATA-5 interface. 
I'm  not sure what one would use the latter for in this application, 
but the built-in USB interface would be nice if one wanted to build a 
unit with both serial and USB interfaces to the host.

It would require considerably more software development, but another 
interesting possibility might be to have an ethernet interface and 
build the disk drive as a network storage/reading device.   The 
MC9S12NE64 has an ethernet MAC and EPHY built-in as well as the more 
common SCI.

And of course, they both have plenty of extra horsepower.

Jeff Walther