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

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Mon Dec 1 12:37:44 2003

ST-506 does have some nasty hardware elements.

If your using the ISA bus, clearly a controller-level emulation using an
ATA drive is the
way to go here.

But if your ST-506 controller uses some other bus the situation changes
dramatically.

For SCSI, its an all-digital interface with available controller chips,
so a SCSI to
ATA emulation seems practical. For older Sun machines, a SASI to ATA
adapter
also seems reasonable.

But directly emulating the ST-506 interface? I'll pass on that job!


Jules Richardson wrote:

>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 - 12:37:44 GMT