Multiple floppies in one system?

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Wed Feb 27 21:38:16 2002

On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, David C. Jenner wrote:

> I like the idea of getting a controller that will handle four drives.
> One of my 486 boards requires an ISA controller card, and the other, I
> think, lets you disable the onboard floppy controller, if necessary.

If you have a board that has VLB slots, Promise Technology made a number
of different ATA controllers with support for 4 floppy drives. Note that
many these boards *don't* support tape drives that use the floppy
controller, due to their design.

Speaking of which, if someone comes across any of the old ATA caching
controllers from Promise Technology, drop me an email. I'm looking for a
number of them to use as test boards for driver development and testing
under Linux and *BSD.

Seagate at one time sold an 8-bit ISA mini-card they called a 'tape drive
controller' that was nothing but a fancy floppy controller. These boards
were very nice in that you could change basically any of their settings
via jumpers, and configure them however you wanted. IIRC, by changing the
settings on these boards, you could put up to 4 of them in a system. I
think I still have a few of these somewhere and should probably take a
picture of one.

If you use a DOS based OS, you will need to find a third-party driver for
the secondary controller, since DOS does not have built-in support for it.
If you use a *nix type OS such as *BSD or Linux, you might have to rebuild
the kernel with support for a secondary controller.

-Toth
Received on Wed Feb 27 2002 - 21:38:16 GMT