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From: grr@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (George Robbins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amy use of PS/2 WORM drives?
Message-ID: <1783@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28-Apr-87 23:34:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.1783
Posted: Tue Apr 28 23:34:59 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Apr-87 04:47:34 EDT
References: <8704270104.AA03871@ingres.Berkeley.EDU> <1763@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> <261@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins)
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 30

In article <261@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.ATT.COM> crs@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.ATT.COM (C. R. Seaman) writes:
>
>> 	- The drive is available with a PC/XT compatible interface card.  The
>> 	  announcement doesn't mention SCSI, although it is a possiblity.  A
>> 	  pretty good chance it would work with the A2088 bridge card...
>
>It may not be that easy to make it work with the A2088.  I read that the
>drive isn't treated as a disk drive, but rather as a networked device,
>due to its capacity.  Could that still work?

Standard MSDOS has a partition size limit of 32MB.  The card apparenly contains
it's own bios that bypasses this restriction and manages to hide the WORM
nature of the drive from the normal user.

In this case, one would either hope to use the BIOS to advantage or bypass
it entirely and let some kind of handler on the Amiga side worry about the
details.

It might turn out that the controller/drive interface is not that complicated
or is closely realated to some standard interface.  In this case you might
want to design an Amiga specific interface card for it.

In any case, it is not clear that this drive will take off in a big way.  The
idea is neat, but the cost is still quite high.  Not every IBM idea takes the
world by storm.  When it is available, I guess we'll take a look and see...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,	uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr@seismo.css.GOV
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)