14 Feb
2002
14 Feb
'02
11:28 a.m.
The floppy drives don't care at all what the modulation scheme ( FM, M^2FM,
MFM, GCR ... ) happens to be. They simply cough up a pulse whenever they see
a flux reversal. The controller cares, however. Consequently, one would
conclude that any drive at all would work. However, the options that the
controller expects to be enabled on the drives can make a big difference, and
failure to enable even one of them can render the controller-drive combination
useless.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe" <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 11:03 AM
Subject: FA: Intel MDS-800
<http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2002926621>. He
has no docs, drives or software with it. Damm! and I just threw out a drive
chassis that went with this one! FWIW it uses CDC drives like these
<http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/mds-800/cdc-dr-f.jpg>. I don't know if
Shugart drives can be made to work with his controller cards or not But
Intel uses a different connecting cable and a different set of controller
cards for the Shugart drives. One the MDS-800s, the Shugart drives uses
M2MFM encoding that's not capable with any other system that I know of but
the CDC drives use MFM encoding and the "standard" CPM disk format aka IBM
3470 format.
Joe