> Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:34:00 +0000
> From: classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
> To: cctalk at
classiccmp.org
> Subject: Disc drive READY output -- any standards?
>
> Hi guys,
>
> Is there a defined standard as to when the READY output on a
> Shugart-type disc drive should go active?
<snip>
> Thanks,
> Phil.
> classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
>
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
Having worked on a number of those HDDs and FDDs my recollection is the
"standard" for asserting READY was, at a minimum, that a disk was loaded and
the drive was "at speed." In some higher end HDDs I seem to recall that it
was not asserted until the heads were at TRACK 00 but I could be wrong.
Speed tolerance was pretty poor with ac motors and I think we just clocked a
retrigerable singleshot with index and required two (or more) indexes faster
than the timeout before we then asserted READY. There was probably a pot on
the singleshot and I suspect it was set to about 90% of nominal RPM for ac
motor drives and probably about 2% for dc motor drives.
The only real issues with motor speed not in range are writing out of
sector/track boundary (high speed) and read data recovery. With today's good
channels read data recover should not a problem over a wide speed range but
with the early primitive channels (e.g. "two time constant") this could be a
problem.
Tom