There are 16 data lines, floppy only has 1.Īlso notice there are no motor control lines or head control lines, just data lines sent to the ide drive telling it what you want it to do and it handles the rest.
#IMATION SUPERDISK DRIVE EXTERNAL PARALLEL PORT 120MB FOR PC PC#
Notice it requires the host pc do everything from starting the motor, to moving the read head. Look at the pinout of the floppy interface here: Compare that to even the parallel port which can handle 2MByte/sec. The floppy interface is also very very slow on sending and receiving data. Its tons of work to connect anything to that connection when you can use usb, ide, even parallel port with ten times less work. It requires the host pc to do everything. The floppy interface is not used for other things because its a very very basic interface. With floppy you have to have an embedded chip to translate the dumb calls the pc makes into reads of the flash. With the ide interface you can connect compact flash to it in about 10 minutes of work. A flash drive works every time and can be done quickly. It was developed because there are still tons of equipment out there that can only be upgraded by floppy, this stuff doesn't have hard drives or any other ports like usb, its slow and prone to errors. It plugged in place of the floppy and was a flash drive. I learned more than I care to about the floppy interface a year ago when I was working with someone to develop a floppy emulator.
The drive itself is essentialy brainless. With flopppy you have to do it all, like, turn on motor, move head, read data bit 1, move read head, read data bit 2, move read head again, turn off motor. With ata interface you send the drive commands like read data, the drive does the rest. I don't mean dumb as calling it dumb, but that as far as electronics go, its very very basic. One of the reasons why is the floppy interface is a dumb interface.
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