[Coco] Cloud-9 CompactFlash to IDE question.

[John E. Malmberg]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 October 2003 19:33, John E. Malmberg wrote: 
> 
> The ones I've dealt with have a 2 pole switch that kills the 5 and 12 
> volt power to the drive, and unlocks the holdin latches at the same 
> time.  I'd be a bit spooky about pulling the drawer with power 
> applied, particularly for a hard drive since what you describe would 
> have the disk still spinning down while its being jostled and removed 
> unless you paused for about 10  seconds for it to stop before 
> finishing the pullout operation.

Yes, I wait before fully removing the drive.

With the newer drives, that is not usally much of a problem because the 
heads retract away from the media as soon as power is cut off.

Have you ever tried carrying a hard drive that was still spinning down?
You can really feel the gyroscopic action if you try certain moves.

> Obviously the drive should be unmounted before so there is no chance 
> of a last minute access/write while its in the process of being 
> powered down.

No problem there.

I just ordered one of the units from Cloud-9, along with a 6309, 
protector and HGB DOS.

I probably will only use the CF to IDE unit in the COCO, as it is likely 
I will be getting a pre-release USB driver for OpenVMS for testing.

I will be using the CompUSA carrier with the IDE drive, because it has 
built in fans.

This allows me to put a removable hard drive and a CD-ROM in one of my 
old full size floppy cases.

With out the fans, there is a possibilty that the hard drive would 
overheat.  And this allows everything to look good.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only