[Coco] IDE interfaces

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 15 March 2016 13:16:29 Tormod Volden wrote:

> 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 know the state of the cf art has move ahead a decade.  I think I would 
treat them by backing up everything to a fresh card at 6 month i-or less 
intervals, keeping track of the write cycles so you'll have an idea of 
its life by the time the first one fails.

Its a bit like concrete, when someone asks if it will crack, wrong 
question as it should be when will it crack, because it will.

> > 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


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>