Toaster Flyer - proprietary drives?

Jules Richardson jules.richardson99 at gmail.com
Sun Oct 18 11:17:09 CDT 2020


I've been talking to the guy in NYC who has the storage portion of what 
appears to have been part of a Toaster Flyer setup (I forget who, but 
someone on the list forwarded details a few months ago) - two 5.25" 
full-height SCSI drives, a 3.5" SCSI drive, passive ISA backplane, and some 
form of TBC card (made by DPS).

I'm not sure who made the 3.5" drive, but the two FH ones appear to be 9GB 
Seagate Elites (I'm assuming they were the two video stores, and the 3.5" 
was for audio).

The big question is whether in a Flyer environment the drives run custom 
microcode or will have been LLFed to something other than a "standard" 512 
byte block size - I believe that the Flyer was really pushing the 
boundaries of what was possible when it was current, and the majority of 
drives on the market just didn't have the necessary throughput (I see a 
"Newtek approved" sticker on one of the Seagates). I know that the storage 
was considered "proprietary", but I don't know if that just means that the 
filesystem was Flyer-specific (i.e. not AFFS), or if there was more to it 
than that.

cheers

Jules


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