I agree with Bert. But I would also offer that an 8052 based hard disk duplicator would be painfully slow and take forever to copy a 5 gig hard drive.

I was reading a web article a while back related to an IDE interfacing post here on the forum. In the article the builder of the 8052 hard disk interface was telling that the 8052 was able to achieve about 30K bytes per second transfer rate with the hard drive. Now if that was a true statement then the net transfer rate in a duplicator would be 1/2 as fast due to the need to read and write all the data. In addition to that the time to copy a 5 gig hard drive would be:

(5*1024*1024*1024)/(15000*60*60)=99.42 Hours!!

See you really do need to use an SBC with a wide bus at 66MHz to the IDE connectors where there is ULTRA DMA support. Note that you may need to connect one hard drive to each of two different IDE cables to achieve the fastest possible disk copy speeds.

Michael Karas