On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, ratacus spartucus wrote:

> i knwo this topic has been mentioned time and time again, but i have
> been search the net and cannot find any resources that deal with the pic
> microprocessor and interfacing a floppy drive or small hard drive.. if
> any one could help with links or code i would be very thankfull and some
> sort of schematic...
>
> thanx
>
> adam

imho the only thing that you could hook to a larger PIC is an
[ATAPI][E]IDE interface, for which you need about 21 wires. For the code,
you are on your own, but the ATA-3 spec is available on the web, and once
you fight your way through the setup it works. There is no limit on the
size of the HDD you can hook up to a PIC, however you will have to rely
havily on the on-drive cache buffers, as the PIC's RAM is tiny, too tiny
to even hold a full allocation unit. All your data protocols will have to
be streaming (pipeline w. no local storage).

hope this helps,

        Peter