BBC Hard Drives
There are three mass hard drive (or 'Winchester') storage options for the
BBC and Master: the original Acorn SCSI interface, the ATA/IDE interface,
and the GoMMC RAMcard.
SCSI Hard Drive
It has been fairly hard to get hold of the original
SCSI cards for the BBC and Master. The SCSI interface
card is a fairly complicated design and it is difficult to get compatible
drives.
It is uncertain what the remaining lifetime may be on existing BBC SCSI
drives, and there is the added complication of finding replacements for
failures.
This is a design for a replacement IDE interface that
can be used with almost all off-the-shelf IDE drives. As far as the computer
is concerned, it is just a hard drive. Up to two physical drives can be
plugged in, providing up to four logical drives under a modfied ADFS or
HADFS. With an appropriate adaptor, a compact flash card can be plugged
into the IDE interface.
With an appropriate root directory installed, the hard drive contents appear
as a disk image that can be accessed by any software that understands
BBC/Master disk images, such as BBCExplorer and BeebEm.
John Kortink has designed a
GoMMC
card which provides the equivalent of hard drive storage with an MMC
RAMcard. Again, as far as the computer is concerned, it just looks like a
hard drive - actually, it just looks like a floppy drive, and replaces
access to floppy drives. The card can be formatted into as many logical drives as will
fit, and can be accessed by a modified DFS, ADFS or HADFS.
The MMC card can easily be removed and plugged into a PC. The raw data can
be accessed with standard MMC card software. The supplied GoMMCio program
allows batch addition and manipulation of disk images on the MMC card.
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Last update: 08-Jun-2005
