[Coco] CoCo and SATA/USB drives.

[jdaggett at gate.net]

Jim


Floppy drives are dinosaurs used on older version of Windows and other vintage 
OSes. USB and Flash drives are vastly more preferable with Modern OSes. 256 MB 
flash drives are now u nder $50 and can hold far more than a single floppy. No 
moving parts and better data retention. Easier to move files from one computer to 
another. The USB floppy is the only floppy that is worth keeping on  a system. 

SATA and USB 2.0 is worthless on the current speed of the COCO unless the USB 
tasks are off loaded to a card that contains all the necessary circuitry to handle 
USB.  All the COCO has to do is service an interrupt and  do load and stores. 
Problem is any FIFO used in the external circuitry will have to pause quite often to 
allow the COCO to clear the FIFO. This will destroy any speed advantage of USB 
2.0 transfer. USB 1.1 is more than enough speed for the COCO. I would not 
conisder USB 2.0.


james


On 23 May 2006 at 23:24, Jim Cox wrote:

> Hi all:
> 
> I'm currently attending training seminar for the SATA 
> Drive Protocol at work.  During today's training the 
> presenter showed a picture of the typical PC with standart 
> Floppy and IDE (PATA) drives and how ugly it looked with 
> all the oder cables.  The next picture was of a PC with 
> SATA Hard Drives and a USB Floppy (USB from the 
> Motherboard)
> 
> This got me thinking about the future of Floppies and Hard 
> Drives for the CoCo community.  With low cost USB External 
> Enclosueres for SATA drives becoming available and with 
> USB floppy drives already available, I think what the CoCo 
> needs is a USB 2.0 adapter that can address both.  I 
> wonder if it is possible to have this adapter create a new 
> drive type that will allow the CoCo to read 1.44M 3.5" 
> floppies.
> 
> I'll follow up later when I have time, but I would like to 
> know what others think about the future of drives and how 
> the changes will affect the CoCo.
> 
> -Jim Cox
> http://www.miba51.com/
> http://www.cloudymidnights.com/
> 
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