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

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Dec 1 16:15:45 2003

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 20:34, Al Kossow wrote:
> With the exception of SMD and ESDI, most small disc interfaces used an
> analog PLL data separator for read data for the drives. There was a LOT
> of variation in sector encoding formats (differing ECC schemes, RLL data
> encoding, etc.)

Hmm. Non-trivial then! :/

> Another problem to consider is how to map sector lengths that aren't
> 512 bytes onto modern discs.

Probably not so much of an issue given the speed of old hardware against
modern stuff - multiple sectors could be combined in software on the
modern hardware to represent a single 'unusual' sized sector on the
original equipment at a rate faster than the original host could process
it anyway.

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon Dec 01 2003 - 16:15:45 GMT