Floppy drive box thingie; was: Re: Wow; $192 for a 5.25

[Jules Richardson]

I'm collating all thoughts in to some form of 'pre-design' document at the 
moment, which is at least a step further than we normally get with these 
discussions :-)

Some questions that it's thrown up:

What values of data transfer rates do we need to support?

What drive rotational speeds do we support (although this is presumably 
largely irrelevant, as a by-product of transfer speed and density select?)

Do we want to support 'extra features' like motorised eject? What about head 
load/unload? Such things mean extra configuration and extra hardware (in that 
some lines need to be able to work as either inputs or outputs depending on 
config)

What configuration exists for a drive (sides, tracks, motor on/off delay etc.) 
that needs to be stored?

How many drives do we want to support? Is it desirable for each drive to have 
it's own connection to the device (rather than the typical 2 or 4 drives per 
cable setup)? Do we even want to do something clever and modular so that each 
drive has its own interface with unique I/O address and you just essentially 
stack them up on the device's CPU address / data bus as needed?

cheers

Jules