On 13/01/11 21:33, Tony Duell wrote:
I don;t think they're any worse than other disk
drives. And a lot better
than that darn Shugart thing with the spirally-gooved plastic disk to
move the hean. ARGH!
Sounds a bit like the helicoid in a camera lens...
Not all 3" drives are belt driven, altough I
think the Amstrad ones we're
discussing are.
Indeed they are. Cheap cassette motor tied to an even cheaper thin
plastic "flywheel" by means of a shoddy little drive belt. On the plus
side it's a fairly standard cassette drive belt so fairly easy to replace...
The worst part about them is that damn flywheel. Most 3.5in drives I've
seen use a honking great slab of heavy metal as a combined flywheel /
rotor (the ring magnets for the brushless motor are inside). There's
enough weight on one of those to smooth out any reasonable level of
speed variation...
Any particualr reason why the belt i na 3" drive
would be more likely to
fail than that in a 5.25" or 8" drive (both of which were commonly
belt-driven)?
In the case of the Amstrad drives? Because they're cheaply-made piles of
junk? :P
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/