🚀 go-pugleaf

   i have been wanting to get a hard drive for my 500, but i am much too
cheap to buy one.  i have come up with a solution and i wanted to bounce
it off of the world for comments and suggestions.  a friend of mine gave
me a 10meg miniscribe 2012 drive for an ibm a few weeks back, and a
light bulb came on in my head.
   my idea is to buy a cheap ibm motherboard (and the appropriate memory,
controller and serial/parallel cards) from a cheap source (like a
hamfest or electronics flea market).  i want to turn the ibm into a file
server running over the parallel or serial lines. i know, it will be
slow, but speed is not a key factor here, CHEAP is.  i am planning to
write a device driver on the amiga side that makes the ibm look like a
regular disk drive.  the amiga will send a packet with track and sector
information along with a command (r/w/?).
   on the ibm side, a fileserver program that will read the track/sector
and send a packet of data (maybe with a primitive
cache) and whammo, a cheap hard disk!  the total cost should be under
$100.  $5 for the power supply, $5-10 for the motherboard, $5-10 for the
par/ser card, free hard disk, borrowed (free) controller card (xebec),
$25 or so for the miscellaneous cables, $?? for memory.  the development
will be done on a friend's ibm, so i MAY not need a keyboard or
monitor card.
   now i ask: what do you think? will it work? does anyone have a device
driver that may work (or help)? has anyone ever done this before? does
anyone have any better (cheaper) alternatives? suggestions? warnings?
   any resposes will be appreciated.
                                              BIG al

btw, this is my first posting.
please send any responses via email to: big@shumv1.ncsu.edu
if it bounces back, try: gar@eceugs.ncsu.edu