28 Oct
1999
28 Oct
'99
5:07 a.m.
Dick,
I have an Altair that came with a North Star MDS-A disk controller and
Shugart SA-400 5.25" disk drives. The disks are hard sectored (10
sectors). I have the manual for the MDS-A card and it does specify the
SA-400 drives. There's no mention of using any other drives, either 5.25"
or 8".
Joe
At 09:06 AM 10/28/99 -0600, you wrote:
I got a question the other day, and it was one about
which I have no clue.
A friend glommed onto an IMSAI box with a North Star disk subsystem, the FDC
for which is a model MDS-A4. He wants to know about whether it is capable
of handling 8" drives. I didn't think to ask whether it had a 50-pin cable
header on it. That would have been too easy. My recollection is that
NorthStar systems had a hard-sectored 5-1/4" drive, usually from Micropolis,
attached, and that one was pretty dense, but wouldn't do CP/M-standard
(IBM-3740 SSSD) diskettes. Is that the case with this controller?
Dick