flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

[Shiresoft]

Uh, no.  Interfacing to an HDA (especially a modern one) is not for the faint of heart.  The drive controller is usually a custom (to the drive family) ASIC.  In many cases the firmware and drive parameters are stored on the drive media itself.  The read/write amplifiers are usually tuned to the specific heads and drive data rate (again those are contained in the custom ASIC).

Creating an SMD (or ESDI) drive emulator doesn't look to be all that difficult since the data is all after the clock recovery and is all digital.  That is when writing, the controller provides the clock (can't remember if the drive provides a reference clock).  On reading, the drive provides the clock.  In those cases, the bits are bits and you don't have to worry about over sampling and jitter.  Plus the interface to the drive is reasonably high level in that the controller sends commands and gets responses.

TTFN - Guy

> On Nov 22, 2015, at 9:08 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Plus one here.  With all the SMD controllers languishing out there due to
> dead drives, you'd think there should be a way to make a cheap little glue
> board that could interface to a modern HDA, with the IDE bits ripped out,
> right?
> 
>> On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 11:18 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
>> 
>> It's on my (long) list of projects.  I first have to finish the MEM11.
>> That will have RF11/RS11s as part of the emulated devices.
>> 
>> I'm planning on using the J1 and associated infrastructure for my other
>> projects (which is why I've spent so much time getting them "right").
>> 
>> TTFN - Guy
>> 
>> 
>>> On 11/22/15 7:45 PM, Jay West wrote:
>>> 
>>> Alas... I have no scsi cards for any of my dec gear. I was hoping for a
>>> CF based device that plugs straight into the unibus... or similar
>>> solution...
>>> 
>>> J
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>