ST-238R and ST-225, likely controller?

ST-225. The 255 is a 40MB drive. Despite the price difference between the 225 and the 238R they were pretty much identical drives (since a 225R == 238). I've never found a late model 225 that wouldn't work with an RLL controller. I won't claim they all will, but I'd guess any manufactured after the 238R hit the lines are really a 238R rebranded as a 225. As far as controllers go when I was first shopping for an 8-bit RLL adapter, the Adaptec cards were significantly less expensive than the Seagate cards. Unfortunately, I think the cards are incompatible in their encoding, so you can't expect an Adaptec formated disk to be readable with the Seagate card. These disks were also very suseptible to head creep over time. I'd be surprised if they don't need a low level format. You might be able to reformat (somewhat) non-destructively with an old copy of Norton Utilities or SpinRite. Eric