Wolf via Ql-Users wrote: > - Filesystem for QUBide drives. This is a very nice feature especially for native hardware, allowing direct data exchange between Q68 and QL with QL-SD.
> - Q40/Q60: > It is now possible to use IDE hard disks formatted with FAT32 and contining > QXL.WIN "drives" A little background info: I was originally planning to design a Q68 compatible SDHC card interface for the Q40/Q60. But driver and hardware use SPI mode, which limits theoretical speed to 3 MB/s. On a Q60 that would not be optimal - even practical speed of a tradititional harddisk via the ISA bus was higher. It turned out that IDE-SD Adapters worked relatively well with SDHC cards, so I asked Wolfgang, why not use IDE instead. Saving the time and cost for hardware development and getting better performance. However these adaptors should be used with caution. Firstly, I could only find adaptors which expect to be IDE "master" and are not jumperable to "slave". This can be an ugly limitation, if you only have one ISA I/O card and it is only for two IDE drives. Personally, I have an ISA card for 4 IDE drives, but these days not easy to find anymore. Secondly, I have experienced severe problems installing "ShoeString" Linux. The original Q60 Linux installed, but did not "like" a "slave" present on the same IDE bus as the IDE-SD adaptor (similar issue with compact flash). It could be that Linux tries to use advanced ATA commands which are well supported by harddisks, but maybe not on those adaptors. If only SMSQ/E is used, I did not notice problems with a slave present on the same bus. However, testing was only minimal. Important: You can not use Tony Tebby's mkpart program to partition FAT32 IDE drives. Two major reasons: 1. The standard partition table was Atari style, but is DOS style for FAT32. 2. In order to make a card readable on x86 PC, the Q40/Q60 must swap all bytes on the ISA bus for DOS style IDE devices. This is because of the ugly little-endian number representation on x86 PCs. 68K represents numbers as they are normally read, and so does the traditional IDE driver of the Q40/Q60. Great job, Wolfgang!!! Peter _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
