Another disk imaging project

Dave Dunfield dave04a at dunfield.com
Thu Aug 4 16:25:41 CDT 2005


>The IDE interface is very simple (the IDE card in this computer is about 
>10 TTL chips and a PAL). It should be possible to link an IDE drive to 
>just about any old computer, as the drive (AFAIK) includes a data buffer 
>RAM, it shouldn't matter if the host can't keep up with the data rate.
>
>I will admit I've not tried it, though.

A couple of years back I implemented an MP3 player using an AVR and IDE
interface - I controlled the IDE through simple parallel ports. The design
didn't even have enough memory to buffer a sector, so it took advantage
of the drive buffer, reading the data directly from the drive's buffer as
it needed it. Writing (which it could do in download mode) was a bit more
interesting...

IIRC the drive was quite easy to talk to.

Regards,
Dave

-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Collector of vintage computing equipment:
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html




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