19 Aug
1997
19 Aug
'97
2:39 a.m.
<> Getting _new_ 8" drives is next-to-impossible
<
<No, not really. I just call up California Digital (310-217-0500,
<or look at http://www.cadigital.com/) and FedEx brings the drives
There is that. Myself I only have two sets of 8" to worry about one sa800
on the cp/m crate (rarely used and that drive is generally powered off)
and my RX02s. Around here 02s are easy to find and I have spares for
everything on it. I also hardly use that, noisy, I have hard drives,
rx50 and rx33 as well. It's there for compatability.
Nearly every system I have has been migrated toward 3.5" drives or up
scaled 5.25s where possible. Exceptions are the Vt180 where compatability
is required and the odd 360k floating around. The PDP-11 and vax DEC
hardware it's not a choice for the most part and I keep them compatable.
Three goals are accomplished, single 3.5" media, more storage than 8 or 5"
formats and power down with media in place is not problematic. All 3.5"
PC/PS2 compatable drives have write interlock on power fail.
One unique thing I've done is to embed two PS2 720k 3.5" floppies inside a
kaypro as 782k hard disks. They are drives A: and B:. They have power fail
but, their bezels are specific to the IBM case. They can be found
real cheap as a result and are a deal. Using Advent turborom in the
5.25/96tpi mode puts 781k on them. By putting them on a bracket inside the
case they are captive and amount to a slow small hard disk from the user
side. For CP/M use 1.5m of on line storage not including the 3.5<782k> and
360k 5.25 on the front pannel makes for a fairly roomy system. That system
has a 2meg ramdisk so it can boot and copy the floppies to ramdisk for
speed. Advantages include if the media fails pop the cover and put in a new
disk and it's less likely to crash the disk if dropped.
The only other storage I keep around is the TU58 dectapeII as it's serial
and can be plugged into anything that can do RS232/423. At 256k a cart its
not big or fast.
What I'd like to find out how to do is use the floppy interfaced tapes
for non-PC systems. These drives in the smaller storage sizes can be found
cheap and even new ones aren't too expensive.
Allison