[Coco] IDE interfaces

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 15 March 2016 11:25:55 John W. Linville wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 09:04:17AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Tuesday 15 March 2016 04:16:51 Tormod Volden wrote:
> > > On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Doug Fraser wrote:
> > > > I'm looking for an IDE interface to replace my Burke n Burke
> > > > adapter. Does anyone know where I can acquire one?
> > >
> > > At least a while ago there were still Glenside IDE boards to be
> > > had. They are supported by HDB-DOS and NitrOS-9.
> > >
> > > 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.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Tormod
> >
> > 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.
>
> They can be used with CF cards, which don't seem to be difficult to
> acquire to me.
>
> John

They aren't hard to source at all, John, I saw some at Wallies the last 
time I drove by that displahg but the read/write cycles are more limited 
than the current crop of solid state sata drives. By about 100x to 1 in 
favor of the solid state sata.

I ran the x86 version of dd-wrt as a gateway guard dog for 5 or 6 years.  
All dd-wrt used it for was booting, any logs it kept were kept in the 
available memory.  Despite its being treated as read-only, the life was 
about 3 years.  So I would not recommend them for a general purpose disk 
replacement.  Perhaps someone here has better/more experience in 
actually using one as gp read/write media on a coco can chime in and 
relate their experience with it.  At the time, the ide to cf adapter was 
in the $8 range so the opportunity to experiment was very inexpensive.  
I've got one, with what I think is a good half gig cf in it but haven't 
ever had/used an IDE interface on my coco3.  I had, and still have, a 
B&B MFM setup, but both the disto and cloud9 scsi controllers were 
considerably faster.  As I have the drives that go with it, and they 
have some sw I wrote for the tv station on them, I've been reluctant to 
part with it.

Its also possible that whats on the pegboard at wallies today has 500x 
the life of the 10 yo stuff I have.
>
> John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>