paulj@b8.INGR.COM (Joey Paul x4129 ) (12/11/89)
A friend of mine recently bought a cheap pc like one I've never seen.
It's a Laser XT Turbo Compaq, very small, one internal floppy (no space
for more), no expansion slots (because of its *very* low profile - only
3 or 4 inches tall). The floppy is installed in the right side of the
system. On the left side is an 8 bit expansion slot.
Now for my question. He'd like to use a hard drive and has bought a
ST-225 with controller and has asked me to "make it work" for him (did
I say friend?). I can get an external drive case with power supply no
problem. My question is what to do with the controller? It will plug
into the expansion slot and works fine, but who wants a board sticking
out the side of their computer? If I mount the controller in the expansion
box it would also work, but I need some type of bus extender cable.
Does such an animal exist? If so where can I find one. If not, any ideas?
--
Joey Paul ...uunet!ingr!b8!dj4104!paulj (UUCP)
( 205 ) 730-4129 b8!dj4104!paulj@ingr.com (INTERNET)
* Intergraph Corp., One Madison Ind. Park, Huntsville, Ala, 35807-4201 *emmo@moncam.co.uk (Dave Emmerson) (12/15/89)
In article <139@b8.INGR.COM>, paulj@b8.INGR.COM (Joey Paul x4129 ) writes: > [deleted] > problem. My question is what to do with the controller? It will plug > into the expansion slot and works fine, but who wants a board sticking > out the side of their computer? If I mount the controller in the expansion > box it would also work, but I need some type of bus extender cable. > Does such an animal exist? If so where can I find one. If not, any ideas? Try it if you really must, but be warned, if it works at all you'll be driving awfully close to the edge. The extender would introduce signal skew, crosstalk, capacitive, resistive and inductive degradation, volts drops on the supply lines, the lot. If his clock speed is slow enough, and the cable is short enough (around 100-150mm top) the driver chips might live out a reasonable lifetime. Plus, in the States, you'd have the FCC to contend with unless you can screen the cable properly, and that'll make it rather rigid. If you can mount the board horizontally inside the PC on 50mm of cable you might just succeed. The only extenders I've ever seen are *huge* PCB's which also tend to suffer from mild doses of the above, we use them for testing prototypes with extra power cables bolted on. Best bet by far would be to rehouse it in a bigger case, I've seen some quite cheap ones advertised. Sorry, Dave E.