Date   : Tue, 11 May 2004 18:33:05 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Disk-on-Chip

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 10:58, Chris Thornley wrote:
> Hi,
> I found these by accident! I am not to sure about there availability in the
> UK but could these possibly be used in some way for the BBC?

curious :-)  I've got one in an old firewall machine and keep meaning to
dig out some more information on the them.

I figured the package had pins with the same signals as an IDE drive on
it (which would be pretty cool!), but a quick scan of those pages seem
to imply that it's nothing more than a standard flash ROM IC. I assume
the host system needs some form of driver running in order to make the
chip appear like a hard drive to the system.

Certainly the firewall machine I have contains a PC-compatible
motherboard with the DiskOnChip in a socket on it, and the ROM BIOS
knows about the existance of the chip and is obviously a custom version.

BBC link - somewhere I have a little box made by Permanent Memory
Systems whick hooks up to a BBC and I believe gives it a solid-state
disk. I haven't opened the module up in years so can't remember what's
unside (and I certainly have no ROM or software to operate it). Seems
like the DiskOnChip is just a modern equivalent though :)

cheers

Jules