[Color Computer] [Coco]Re: Transfer utilities

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Robert Gault may have mentioned these words:
>A single controller will handle 4 drives in the normal fashion or more if 
>you do some tricky poking of the drive access values.

Depends.

If you're talking single-sided drives, that's true. However, for Side 
Select, didn't they use one of the drive number lines? I *thought* (yea, 
that could be a bad thing) that if you had double-sided drives, you could 
only have 3 drives....

Notes:

1) 3 DS drives is still a lot more data storage than 4 single-sided drives, 
so that's not that big of a deal...

2) I've only ever had a maximum of 3 drives hooked up to my CoCo at once (1 
external HH 5.25 drive made by IBM, and 2 3.5" 720K Drives) so I've never 
actually *tested* the 4-drive concept.

3) As long as you have the room to add 3 or 4 connectors to your ribbon 
cable (or are able to make your own, like I can) a "special" cable is not 
needed.

=-=-=-=

Just to throw a monkey-wrench in the works... How about 2" Drives???

;^>

[[ Yes, they made 'em, yes, they're electrically compatible as they're DSDD 
80-track 250KHz data rate 720K storage devices, but they *do* need a 
special cable that I've yet had a chance to make. Search ePay for a Zenith 
"Minisport" and you'll see they used 2" drives. Cute little suckers... ;-) ]]

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers |     Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com          |