Re: Possible new hardware project

[Mike Pfaiffer <pfaiffer@mbnet.mb.ca>]

	Just an odd thought... How about something to subsitute for a
harddrive? I don't know if it would be cost effective or not. You could
certainly use old SIMMs for the RAM portion. The method you outline
would certainly improve reliability, stability, and speed.

	As to my interest in the device... I'm looking for work again (too many
short term contracts and not enough permanent work) so it would not be a
good idea for me to think about for the moment.

				Later
				Mike





"Terence J. Boldt" wrote:
> 
> Some of you may remember the ROM-Drive card I designed, built
> and sold (and still sell).  It seems that while many people are
> interested in it, they have trouble finding time to put together
> a disk image to have me then burn onto an EPROM.  Although the
> current drive is very fast and reliable, sometimes it would be
> cool to be able to just write directly to it like a hard drive.
> There is a chip out there that acts like RAM and automatically
> burns itself to EEPROM on powerdown but it holds very little
> memory and is prohibitively expensive for this application.
> There are other options.  Flash-RAM is relatively cheap but it
> must be burned in sectors (64KB at a time on the 29F040) and
> therefore can't be used directly with ProDOS without some sort
> of RAM buffer on the card.  Today I came up with the idea of
> having a RAM drive and an equally sized Flash-RAM on board.  On
> initial boot-up, the Flash-RAM is copied to RAM.  All operations
> occur on the RAM drive.  When you're ready to make things
> permanent, you could run a little utility to burn it to the
> Flash-ROM.  Currently I'm selling the 1MB ROM-Drives for $60
> U.S. but this hi-brid drive would have to be somewhere around
> $80 ~ $100 U.S. and be only 512KB.  It could be expanded to
> larger capacities for about $30 ~ $35 U.S. per 512KB.  If there
> is sufficient interest, I will begin designing and prototyping
> this new board.  The last card took almost a year to go from
> idea to reality.  This one should only take about 6 months to go
> to production.
> 
> So now I ask you, would anyone be interested in such a drive at
> that cost?
> 
> --
> Terence J. Boldt
> apple2@cgocable.net
> http://www.cgocable.net/~apple2
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