[Coco] CoCo and SATA/USB drives.

[jdaggett at gate.net]

Jim

Using the Coco as a client and a PC as a server is not all that bad of an idea. 
Whether the connection is via TCP/IP or via Drivewire really makes no major 
differences. 

My only concerns is why the need  for such a large storage capacity for the COCO 
that SATA provides? Outside the RAID capabilities and the scarcity of sub 10 Gig 
drives, 300GB of storage is it really needed? I have a 250 Gig hard drive on my PC 
and half of that drive is still unpartitioned. Between the 80 Gig and the 127 Gig 
partition on the 250 Gig drive I still have 124 Gig of free space.  For the current 
Coco a 10Gig is probably more than enough. 

WIth many of the issues of transferring programs from the PC/MAC to the COCO,  
Drivewire seems to be the best solution to date. ONly thing that I could see that 
maybe used is the newer Flash drives. This would require that the COCO have 
some form of USB or CF card to transfer data other than floppies. A utility to extract 
disk images on the COCO side would also be nice if that does not already exist. 

I still believe that some partial implementation of USB Spec 1.1 can be done. Flash 
drives are becoming cheap enough that it is quite tempting to look into that means 
of data storage and transfer. 128 MB flash drives are in the sub $30 range now. 

just some thoughts 

james
On 25 May 2006 at 21:53, Jim Cox wrote:

> I wanted to jump back into this and make a few comments. 
>  I need to keep it brief since I am in the middle of 
> cleaning out my email accounts before I have them blown 
> out and rebuilt due to a bug in my hosting service email 
> program.
> 
> I had several ideas, but I am only going to suggest the 
> simplest, and the is to use a Linux box to handle the 
> Floppies and HDDs (PATA or SATA) and then using Driveware 
> Server or something similar to communicate to the CoCo. 
>  Actually I think it would be nice to have a CoCoLinux 
>  that would be taylored to us CoCo users.  One thought I'd 
> like to add, is there a program or solution in Linux that 
> can be used to read and write 360K 5.25" drives or 720K 
> 3.5" drives?
> 
> -Jim Cox
> http://www.miba51.com/
> 
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 16:14:35 -0400