Archiving workstation hard drives

[Tony Duell]

[...]

> What I'd really like I suppose is a user-space driver for a widget that 
> provided SCSI and SASI support via a *totally* dumb HBA (i.e. polled I/O and 
> twiddling of bus lines "directly") - in other words, one step less intelligent 
> still than most "dumb" HBAs (which still use some sort of SCSI IC). It'd be 
> slow as molasses, but speed isn't the critical factor compared to flexibility 
> and ease of driving.

The lack of a decent 'user port' on PCs is a major pain for hardware 
hackers like me :-). Peronally, I'd probably use something like an 
HP9000/200 series machine (neat, repairable, and has an exceellent 16 bit 
parallel I/O card availalbe), but that's hardly a universal solution.

> 
> Unfortunately a PC parallel port doesn't quite have enough I/O lines, I 

Could yuo not add some latches/buffers to tha parallel port to get more 
I/O lines, and use a couple of the 'handshake' outputs to select between 
them? 

-tony