[Color Computer] [Coco]Re: Transfer utilities

[Robert Gault]

Yes, the drive3 (fourth drive) select is used as a side select switch 
with double sided drives. So if all the drives are double sided, the 
limit is three (which can be used as 6 single sided drives.) If all 
drives are single sided than 4 can be used.

Combinations of double and single drives lead to interesting results. At 
one time I had two double sided, one single sided, and two hard drives 
on my system. Each of the floppy sides could be addressed directly 
effectively giving 5 floppy drives.

I had modified cc3disk so that the number of possible drives were 
increased over four and could POKE the DB ROM; thus could select any of 
five sides separately under both OS-9 and Disk Basic.

Roger Merchberger wrote:

> 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          |
> 
>