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Volume 2, ISSUE 03

March 2006

Hard Drives on the CoCo?
YES!! EVEN BACK IN 1989!

Welcome everyone to the March 2006 issue of More Marshmallows. I worked so much through February, that I decided to combine (like last year) the January- February and skip right to Issue 3- March. This month, I thought I would be lazy and Scan in an interesting article from The Rainbow magazine.

Hard Drives for the CoCo

A big discussion on the CoCo forms this month, centred around hard drives. In-fact a CoCo 2 hard drive controller is up on E-bay right now (march 17) and a lot of discussion evolved around if getting this rare piece of hardware for the CoCo was really worth it. The short answer is NO (unless you are a collector). Why?- the tandy Hard disk controller only worked with Tandy drives, and no drivers or support went with them. In fact, they were WAY over priced at the time and contain nothing but a few chips on a bread board. Tandy Drive Zero hard drives are rare and only came in small sizes. There were and still are way better alternatives. Your best bet (in my opinion, and I am doing this) is to ether wait for Cloud 09's "Super board" or get an IDE controller from them. Why IDE and not SCSI? Simple- IDE is so popular, you can pick up small drives (under 5 gigs) for free or next to nothing. Nobody wants them, so they make perfect drives, in fact the best would probably be a 2 gig laptop drive, because you can hide them anywhere- even inside your CoCo! (just not the controller). I myself have a Quantum "Bigfoot" drive set aside, it was a huge 5 1/2 inch monstrosity, but relatively flat, it will fit nicely in a floppy drive case with no adapters needed.

Rainbow Article

The following is an article from the March 1989 issue of rainbow magazine by (Dr.) Marty Goodman. It has been reprinted without permission, and I owe another quarter for it. Enjoy, untill next month.
-Glen

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