> Does anyone know what the typical range of floppy
and ST506/ST412 drive
> track-to-track seek rates is?
On Sun, 26 Feb 2012, Eric Smith wrote:
When I worked at Apparat around 1981, the
company's main products were
for the TRS-80.
One of the things that I remember about Apparat (slightly before that) was
that NewDOS (was it only in NewDos80, or all the way back to APRDOS?) gave
the user the capability to set the step time, to be able to take advantage
of the 5ms step time of the Tandon, etc. drives, rather than have to
always step everything at 40ms to be able to handle the original SA400
(the original drive shipped with TRS80).
Shugart tried to get us to sell a cost-reduced floppy
drive.
"cost-reduced" is a helluva euphemism for POS!
Our conclusion was that even though the drive was
slightly less
expensive than a normal drive, there would be essentially *zero*
customer demand for it.
We did have one administrator pushing HARD to have us switch the entire
TRS80 lab over to using Exatron "Stringy Floppy"! Sometimes people will
put up with amazing things to save a few pennies!
I don't think I've heard of a "real"
floppy drive with more than 15 ms
track-to-track seek time,
SA400 (at 40ms) was still considered to be a
"real" drive in those days,
but not for much longer.
[Did I give you my Micropolis 35 track with one of my model 1s?]