[Coco] Live AND Learn..........

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 10 August 2018 17:21:36 Stephen Fischer wrote:

> The recommended method to get a hard disk going that has stiction is:
>
> Place the drive on the floor and spin it with your hand. No power or
> other cables attached.
>
> Get a more modern drive soon that does not have the possibility of
> stiction. I had to drive over the hill towards Santa Cruz to get an
> engineer to reload the old firmware that did 256 byte sectors.
>
> Perhaps a SSD now.

Some one needs to make us a sata interface, as I noted in the last month 
and got shot down in flames. Pick one of the credit card puters with a 
sata interface, and write a relay program that looks like drivewire to 
the coco's using the existing spi driver.  Could be done with less than 
$100 in hardware, and I can buy a 120GB ssd from Newegg right now for 
about 50 cents a gigabyte. I have one of those on a pi, or a rock64 
right now, and still have a spare in the box yet. From the pi:
 pi at picnc:~ $ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       30387788 10206340  20148680  34% /
devtmpfs          468264        0    468264   0% /dev
tmpfs             472584        0    472584   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs             472584    36152    436432   8% /run
tmpfs               5120        4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             472584        0    472584   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1     41322    32253      9070  79% /boot

/dev/sda1        1079220        4   1079216   1% /media/boot
/dev/sda3       50132520  3070496  44539180   7% /media/slash
above /sda is a 60GB SSD I paid $40 for
tmpfs              94520        4     94516   1% /run/user/1000

/dev/sdb2       79086196    53272  74972460   1% /media/work
/dev/sdb1       35635848    49128  33753456   1% /media/backupsd

and the above is a 120GB I paid less than $60 for, both active and usable 
as I type.

And since I think drivewire 4 is written in java (somebody correct me if 
thats not the case) theres a slim chance drivewire could be made to run 
on that $35 armhf platform.  Its running other java utils just fine.

For speed checks, and bear in mind this is funneled thru the pi's 
internal usb-2 hub, hence the near identical cached speeds.

pi at picnc:~ $ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   960 MB in  2.00 seconds = 479.49 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  56 MB in  3.33 seconds =  16.83 MB/sec
pi at picnc:~ $ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   954 MB in  2.00 seconds = 476.41 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  72 MB in  3.01 seconds =  23.91 MB/sec

Either of those buffered reads is faster than drivewire can move it to- 
from the coco's.

-- 
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>