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

From: James Dickens <jdickens_at_ameritech.net>
Date: Tue Dec 9 19:40:33 2003

On Tuesday 09 December 2003 19:00, Eric Smith wrote:
> I wrote:
> > If the RAM is organized 8 bits wide, the cycle time doesn't need to be
> > faster than 200 ns (assuming 25 ns sampling). That's not particularly
> > fast.
>
> I should clarify that I'm assuming that the host uses buffered seek
> and properly uses the -SEEK COMPLETE signal from the drive.
>
> If the drive does not use buffered seek, it is necessary to transfer
> a new cylinder's data into the buffer RAM in less than the seek time.
> As far as I know, the highest capacity 5.25-inch Winchester drives that
> did not use buffered seek had no more than four heads, 615 cylinders,
> and no less than 20 ms seek time, so the maximum transfer rate needed
> to transfer data to and from the backing disk is about 33 MB/s. This
> would require RAM with a 30 ns cycle time. More practically, the
> buffer RAM could have a x16 or x32 organization, stretching the
> cycle time requirement to 60 ns or 120 ns.

okay not an expert, but most systems using these drives used interleaving of
sectors(because there was no way the system was fast enough to handle the
data), the IBM PC used a factor of 6. The machine the device would not know
what to do with 30MB/s of data if you produce it. i doubt any machine having
such a drive would benefit from more than 4MB/s and producing data faster
than the machine expects can cause timing errors, that were not noticed when
the machine was new. i guess after the device is made.. yo u will have to
spend more time slowing it down than trying to get it faster.


>
> I think a disk emulator would still be a useful product if it ONLY
> supported emulation of drives with buffered seek capability. Perhaps
> a different model could be used for drives without buffered seek; such
> a model might simply buffer the entire drive contents (about 205 MB).
>
> Eric
Received on Tue Dec 09 2003 - 19:40:33 GMT