PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Jules Richardson]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 10/11/2005 at 12:03 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> 
> 
>>But a DECstation 2100/3100 comes with a floppy drive hooked to a board 
>>with a 34-pin floppy header, and then the SCSI bus from the motherboard 
>>plugs into the translator board.  Could something like this be used?
> 
> 
> Perhaps.  But I've not seen one the DECStation boards up close, so I don't have a clue as to what its capabilities might be.
> 

In the case of the Torch Manta board - which is presumably similar to 
the DEC and SMS offerings, it was just a SCSI controller chip, CPU, FDC 
chip (WDC of some sort IIRC, but one of the less-common ones), and the 
expected ROM, RAM etc.

It'd support four floppy drives of pretty much any type, although there 
were some limitations when tweaking what pins were used for inputs or 
outputs (typically all of the potential four drives on the one board 
were expeted to use the same electrical interface)

At a software level it needed a SCSI command to define drive parameters, 
and from them on it was just like any other SCSI device with multiple 
LUNs and removeable media.

No access was given to any of the raw data stream, though. The board 
took care of that - it was highly configurable otherwise though.

I expect all SCSI-floppy bridge boards are very similar, although 
earlier ones probably don't support things like SCSI INQUIRY.

cheers

Jules