tss@lanl.gov (Timothy S Sullivan) (07/03/90)
I recently bought a used, 2 floppy, Leading Edge model D for use as a word processor and a terminal for connection to Unix machines at work. The first thing I want to upgrade is to a hard drive and either now or preferably a little later a 1.2M and/or 1.44M floppy. The machine has only four slots so I want to be a little conservative of the slots. The machine now has two 360K floppies controlled off the motherboard. I presume that each of the floppies takes up a half-height slot in the only drive bay. Looking through the backs of magazines, the most straightforward thing to do seems to be to buy a half-height hard drive, say a Seagate ST251(?) 40Mb drive, with a 8bit kit option, and one of the floppy controller that can handle any of the 360/720/1.2/1.44 formats. What bothers me about this is: It takes up two slots, and leaves me only one half-height slot for floppies. (OK, OK, I knew what I was getting when I bought it :^) .) So the question is are there any imaginative solutions out there? I looked for an 8bit controller that would combine HD and any FD type, but only found 16bit controllers that would do that. Is there some technical reason for that? (At least this would save me a slot.) Is there some controller that would accomodate external HD or FD as well as internal? Any suggestions/recommendations would be appreciated. Tim Sullivan (tss@lanl.gov)