Disk hardware emulation, was Re: Grandfather system RTE6/VM?

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Dec 1 11:47:37 2003

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 16:32, Andreas Holz wrote:
> 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
relationship to the host controller with which the drive was formatted?

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon Dec 01 2003 - 11:47:37 GMT