MFMulation? (Solid-state replacements for MFM drives)

[Allison]

>
>Subject: MFMulation? (Solid-state replacements for MFM drives)
>   From: Entity <entity at nenevr.demon.co.uk>
>   Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 23:05:49 +0100 (BST)
>     To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>
>
>Hello, all.
>
>Does anyone on the list know if anyone in our extended community has ever
>come up with some sort of plug-compatible flash memory replacement for MFM
>drives?

No.  Flash has a write limit before failure.  that makes it useless for 
swap/page space.  Also the number of CHS combinations of old disks were 
numerous.


>I've a vague idea that I've seen a commercial offering at some point in
>the past, but obviously that'd be a fairly expensive move to make.
>(Fairly? Oh, OK. Very.)
>
>I've got a Northstar Horizon that I mentioned on here many, many years
>ago and I've just started looking at it again; once I've got it up and
>running it'd be nice to add some sort of permanent storage, but without
>jettisoning one of the floppy drives. The SuperIO board is one option,
>but I'd like to keep it as stock-Northstar as I can.

CF to s100 takes maybe 10 peices of generic ttl, It would require a 
new (or argumented) bios for CP/M and NSdos never supported a hard disk
(or similar) without a rewrite (except on the Advantage).

I've done both IDE and CF for 8085 and z80 systems as a way to get bulk 
storage for them.  It's easy to do in hardware and a software project
as there is no direct support off the shelf (one of hardware).

Allison