On 11 Sep 2012 at 8:17, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Mouse wrote:
I've got a 3?" SCSI floppy drive (yes, a
floppy drive with a SCSI
interface!) that reports itself as having 256-byte blocks.
Does it have any provision to reconfigure?
If it's a drive used in a lot of workstations (e.g. Teac FD235S),
it's a standard FD235HF with a bolted on SCSI-to-Floppy
adapter/controller. Sector size is strictly a matter of firmware,
but I believe the Teac drives allowed for different sector sizes.
If it's one of the "flopticals", such as the old InSite or LS-120
drives, format choice is much less flexible, although most LS-120
drives (as well as most USB drives) will *read* (but not format) PC98
1024-byte sector floppies.
The big problem that makes SCSI unsitable for universal floppy use is
that it's strictly block-relative addressing--the entire disk is
assumed to contain tracks of the same number and size sectors. This
can create issues when a disk has, say, an FM first cylinder with the
remainder of the disk MFM (not as uncommon as one might think).
--Chuck