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

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

>Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 22:58:33 -0400
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Re: Drive Reliability (was SCSI drive for sale at 
buy.com)
>From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>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.

Well... I'll drool a bit... but I already have a few decent sized MFM
drives, and not a lot of rescues that would need one... so if you want it,
and he's willing to sell it... I won't dehydrate drooling :-)


>
>   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.

interesting.... I think I had heard that before... it has been soooo long.

>
>   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.

true... MFM and RLL are probably both not very fitting names for their
interfaces... but did fall into popular use, so I'm sure everyone understood
what I meant.... but the history lessons are always cool... lest we forget
the past...

>
>       -Dave
>
>--
>Dave McGuire                "They live deeply, these vagabonds."
>St. Petersburg, FL                            -Goro
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>rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

-- Curt