Disk on a Chip ??

[lezanderson]

The MD2800-D08-X DiskOnChip ( Emulates a Floppy Disk) ??

Hi.

Does anyone know much about this MD2800-D08-X DiskOnChip . An IC (available in DIP32) that I'm assuming is some form of Silicon Disk that Emulates an FDC+Floppy Drive ?

Datasheet :

http://www.qscomp.cz/Pdf/doc_2000.pdf
https://www.usbid.com/assets/datasheets ... ystems.pdf

May be possible to use this to make a small PCB/Circuit that could replace SDX module&Floppy Drive or maybe not ?

Best Regards
Lez

[Martin A]

A quick look at the data sheet, it looks like this is a memory mapped device. It doesn't look like any sort of floppy replacement.

[lezanderson]

I think it's supposed to replace the actual physical Floppy disk itself ? It would be connected to an FDC (floppy disc controller, uPD765 etc) via glue logic. So the system would just think it's a large floppy disc. This would have advantages in reliability, larger capacity and faster ?

[stephen_usher]

It won't be much faster as the data transfer rate is fixed by the controller. The only speed-up would be due to the lack of with latency seeking track to track. The controller reads a whole track at a time (or waits a specific period for the sector to come around before starting to read). The drive itself does nothing to the data and is a dumb device.

[1024MAK]

All floppy disk systems that I have seen transfer data as a serial data stream via a single data line.

I think the devices in the first post are more like something that could be fitted to an embedded system to save having a small hard drive. The idea being that the BIOS (in ROM) could "boot" the system from such a chip, and then run a small application on the embedded system.

Mark