Let's start a project to develop a black-box for ST506, SMD and ...
replacement!
We need some hardware freaks on one side and of course some software
freaks too.
Similar stuff has been done. Have a look at:
http://www.chd.dyndns.org/qbus_ide/
Andreas
Tony Duell 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.
>>
>>
>
>I'd rather have one interface/drive per system. It could probably fit in
>place of the existing drive (certainly on machines like the PERQ where
>there's plenty of space round the hard disk), and would mean the machine
>stays self-contained.
>
>
>
>>Interesting idea anyway... but given the nature of ST506 is it feasible?
>>Doesn't ST506 have analogue elements to the interface, and a tight
>>
>>
>
>All the signals on the interface connectors are digital, but the data is
>the 'raw' data from the head, not packed into nice sectors and bytes
>(doing that is the job of the controller). So the timing is, to some
>extent, analogue.
>
>However, suppose the data rate is something like 5MHz (I think that's
>right for ST506). If you sampled the data output from the controller at,
>say, 50MHz, wrote the pattern of 0's and 1's to the new hard disk (OK,
>very wasteful of disk space, but then we're proposing replacing a 20Mbyte
>sisk with a 20Gbyte one or something :-)), and then turned the data on
>the new disk back into a 50MHz signal that you fed back to the
>controller, I think it would work. Might be interesting to try, anyway...
>
>-tony
>
>
>
>
Received on Wed Dec 03 2003 - 01:24:40 GMT