[Coco] IDE interfaces

[Tormod Volden]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 2:04 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 March 2016 04:16:51 Tormod Volden wrote:
>> If there are no boards left we should try to have more made. Maybe
>> somebody is working on it, because request about schematics come up
>> from time to time.
>>
> Lets look at reality Tormod.  And that is that if new boards are made,
> they should be designed to handle sata drives simply because that is all
> we can buy today. Anything we can pick up at a flea market today, quite
> likely has had its 50,000 hours of spin time and isat best using a cane
> to get around like I am.

Hi Gene,

You can use CF cards, they are still available and very affordable for
a 8GB or 16GB card.

>
> I think possibly a few dollars more expensive because that likely would
> have to have not only the interface chip, but there would need to be a
> fpga translation and buffer memory just to bridge the gap between bus
> speeds.  Current sata drives can move data at 6GB/second, so seek time
> is the random access speed limiter but at the coco's speed that is a
> total non-issue.

An IDE interface is pretty simple, just a data latch to translate
8->16 bit and not much more. That's the beauty of it. A SATA interface
is much more complicated, I believe, but please prove me wrong. And
our "standard" software can use the Glenside interface already. The
Glenside interface is a retro thing itself.

Then there are IDE<->whatever interfaces for those who like.

Regards,
Tormod