BillW wrote:
>You might try one of those SCSI interfaces that connects to a PC parallel
>port ... [this gets] rid of the "cheap" qualifiers.

Doug Sellner wrote:
>Now this is the best solution to disk i/o yet.

During the course of this discussion the original design parameters have
been lost, however to carry it to its illogical extreme...

The BEST solution to disk I/O is to buy a PC/XT clone (I've seen them for
< $80 including 20mb disk.) and run a program on the PC that looks for a
simple serial protocol from the PIC. My favorite is similar to the EEPROM
protocol:
sending         <CMD><ADDRESS><DATA>
returning       <STATUS><DATA>

Where CMD is one of <READ><WRITE><VERIFY><WRITE-NEXT><READ-NEXT>
and ADDRESS is a 24 bit number specifying the address of the byte
and <DATA> is an 8 bit byte.

Now on a serial connection at any baud rate (up to the limit of the
PC's serial port) you can store and retrieve information from the
hard disk. Effectively making the PC a giant disk controller.

Of course its a ludicrous idea because why would you have the PIC driving
a PC and not the other way around?

--Chuck