serial hard drive

would anyone be interested in a controller board to attach a standard 3.5 inch IDE/ata drive via the empeg serial port.
for use as AUX storage and or backing up thier player?

that would be pretty handy, but how long will it take to push through 36Gb ??
and how will the data be arranged? will it be a mirror image of the empeg loadout? (files as fid names? or will there be accompanying software to rename the fids to some sort of recognizable filename?)

Smoker_Man
#080000449 MkII - 36Gb Blue

The serial port? That would be SLOW! Mind numbingly so. A quick calculation suggests it would take about 20 days to back up a 40Gb player.

Rob

for use as AUX storage

At 115Kbits/sec, you wouldn't be able to play MP3s off it, even if you wrote a Linux block driver for it and somehow arranged for the player to mount it.

and or backing up their player?

Why not just use a PC, assuming you're not dead set on in-car backup? Not only are they quite capable serial-to-IDE adaptors, but they also function as (much faster) USB-to-IDE adaptors and Ethernet-to-IDE adaptors.

Or are you talking about completely subverting the serial port, and not running RS232 serial over it at all? In which case, you'd better wait until we come up with a way of upgrading player software which doesn't involve the serial port.

Peter

Peter, does this mean that you have some implicit coupling to the serial port?

I was under the impression you were opening it as a system device. Am I wrong here? I am also looking to take over the serial to couple on an external acquisition board - what's the story?

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Peter, does this mean that you have some implicit coupling to the serial port?

no

I was under the impression you were opening it as a system device.

We are -- I was just concerned that matey was thinking of putting extra hardware inside the empeg to convert the serial port into some other sort of port (faster and more suitable for connecting a winchester to). That would be a Bad Idea [tm] as upgrading requires a real serial port.

Peter

...and also not really possible as the serial port hardware is on the same chip as the CPU...

Hugo

what about using the serial port at 230400 Kbit?
even with overhead it should be able to keep up with a 128K mp3.

Yes, this would work if you were suitably perverse to try it :)

It will reduce the effectiveness of caching though, as it will spend almost as much time caching as playing!

Hugo

Yes, this would work if you were suitably perverse to try it :)

Didn't Commodore 64s speak to winchesters over serial? (And it wasn't 230kbit, either.) Or am I mixing it up with floppies?

Peter

Definitely floppies. I never knew anyone with a C64 & hard disk, but the PET ones were IEEE488 (floppies, winchesters, printers, teamakers, small aubergines).

Hugo

Nah, C64 used a DB25 SCSI-esque link for the Hard disk. I think there was an adapter into the cartridge slot. One of my co-workers ran his BBS off of one.

_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

No, they used IEEE488 based floppy drive subsystems.

But thinking about that, it is in fact a form of serial bus with parallel access control....

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

... you forgot the cuddly toy! Cuddly Toy!

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Definitely floppies. I never knew anyone with a C64 & hard disk, but the PET ones were IEEE488 (floppies, winchesters, printers, teamakers, small aubergines).

Early Commodores (e.g. 32k PET 2001 on which I wrote a number of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy programs) had more or less normal IEEE488 'GPIB' bus (I even had an external shoebox-size IEEE488 to RS232 interface used for connecting multichannel analysers without GPIB), while C64 had some kind of serialized version. But disk drives were definitively floppies, with considerable local inteligence and abysmal reliability.

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Beating the dead horse here.

The original intention of the serial to ATA adapter was to allow the use of 3.5" drives ( that are cheaper, more common, and of larger capacity then 2.5" laptop drives) with the Empeg. This was at a time when the largest laptop drive was about 30 or 40GB, and 80GB 3.5" drives could be had.

With the impending failure of my second drive I'm revisiting this concept, The idea being to pipe the parallel ATA commands over the serial port at 230400bps, maybe even strip out the start and stop bits and just use the port as a shift register like Commodore intended with it's "IEC" interface. with the correct patches applied to the kernel the drive should appear just like another disk, and use the standard Empeg partitions and file system.

Another option I'm considering is to modify my MK2 and sled to have docked Ethernet, this should facilitate connection to a networked hard drive. My only question being would said device support the Empeg file system?

Why not just buy it a new hard drive or two? Shock tolerant, and they'll fit in the empeg's case. If it's storage you want, you could pick up a pair of seagate's new 160's and have a 320GB empeg (though I shutter to think of fscking it... and I don't know if the player software could deal with that filled with 4mb tracks)

Matthew

what is the going rate for two 160GB 2.5" drives?

EDIT never mind Epay $350 to $425... no thanks. I'll keep looking.

It'd probably run you about $700. But you're paying the top-o-the-line premium. Stick with 120's and you can do it for $330.

Matthew

Thanks for looking

it still looks like it will cost about $400 tho for a pair of 120s.

$349.36, shipped to my door with CA sales tax at newegg. And they're Western Digital, so any jpgs you store on then will have brighter colors.

Matthew

Doing it over the serial port would be painfully slow. You'll be limited to playing something significantly less than 220kbps as well. Just go and buy a new laptop drive if you really want more storage.

The empeg already has the hardware to talk to any size ATA drive available -- using the existing ATA/IDE disk interface, with an adapter cable (connectors differ between notebook and larger drives). All that is needed extra is a power supply for the desktop drive.

I've done this, and it works. Pointless, but it works.

-ml

Well, at the time it was not pointless. You were proving out the higher capacity drives with the new hijack kernels.

Edit: Found it. It was around version 274 where you added lba48 support directly into the hijack kernel for supporting drives larger than 128GB. Given that the largest laptop drives were about 80GB at the time, it was the only way you could test. Now, with the 160GB drives out there (waiting for the price to come down before even contemplating any upgrades...), it becomes a much more immediate feature!

ml

after reading the last post, is there a specific way someone can setup their drive so that some of the tunes are still playable if they need to downgrade from Hijack for testing?

If one really wants a drive that is fully accessible with a "stock kernel" (who uses that these days???), then just don't get a drive larger than 132GB.

Cheers

Then I shoun't have any problems for now, as I'm not willing to spend the $ for a 160GB drive at the current prices.

I noticed your sig and attempted to fix that for you. It would appear that I don't have the right power in the right places. I suggest sending a pm to drakino.

I did thank you for trying .

Quote:
Beating the dead horse here.

The original intention of the serial to ATA adapter was to allow the use of 3.5" drives ( that are cheaper, more common, and of larger capacity then 2.5" laptop drives) with the Empeg. This was at a time when the largest laptop drive was about 30 or 40GB, and 80GB 3.5" drives could be had.

With the impending failure of my second drive I'm revisiting this concept, The idea being to pipe the parallel ATA commands over the serial port at 230400bps, maybe even strip out the start and stop bits and just use the port as a shift register like Commodore intended with it's "IEC" interface. with the correct patches applied to the kernel the drive should appear just like another disk, and use the standard Empeg partitions and file system.

Another option I'm considering is to modify my MK2 and sled to have docked Ethernet, this should facilitate connection to a networked hard drive. My only question being would said device support the Empeg file system?

Hmm networked hard drive- maybe iSCSI would be an option for that. That would give the empeg direct access to the networked iSCSI volume, so it could format it and everything no problem. Not sure how you would compile iSCSI support into the kernel though..