[rescue] Re: Drive Reliability (was SCSI drive for sale at buy.com)

[Dave McGuire]

On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 08:15 PM, Jeffrey Nonken wrote:
>> Well, if you ever go to dispose of any high capcity (100MB or higher)
>> MFM drives... don't toss em... just e-mail me... depending on what
>> you have, I'll pay the shiping to save it.
>
> I think my ESDI drive is 150 meg. The next larger, if I haven't tossed 
> it,
> would be a Seagate ST4096. After that you get down around 35 meg and 
> lower.
> I think the MR522 is about 20 meg. I'm pretty sure I've already tossed 
> my
> ST412; last time I used it, it was showing signs of age.

   If you still have an ST4096 and Curt isn't drooling over it, I'm 
definitely interested in it.

   The ST412 would actually be a semi-decent historical preservation 
piece, though I'd probably opt for an ST-506.  The "MFM interface" is 
commonly referred to as the "ST-506 interface", although the actual 
ST-506 drive had some interface differences.  The ST-412 is actually 
the drive whose interface which the later crop of mainstream MFM drives 
was based on, so it would be more correctly called the "ST-412 
interface" which some people actually did call it.

   Calling it "MFM" is a bad idea, even though the term came into common 
use.  The fact that the data was recorded using Modified Frequency 
Modulation has precisely jack squat to do with [most of] the interface, 
and indeed some other types of [non-ST-412-interfaced] drives used MFM 
recording methods.

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                "They live deeply, these vagabonds."
St. Petersburg, FL                            -Goro