4 Nov
2010
4 Nov
'10
2:19 p.m.
On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Philip Pemberton wrote:
Yes, most of them :-). More seriously, there are Hitachi 3" drives that
have a normal 34 pin edge connecotr (SA400-like pinouts) and powr
connector.
Ho yus. The current support list includes:
* Amstrad 3-inch (if I ever figure out why I can write 3us-spaced
pulses and get nothing but garbage back from the drive)
There are 3 inch drives that will hook up to a PC. Formatting PC-DOS "360K" on a disk and trying to read THAT
would at least give you a known
content on the disk. In addition, Amdek sold 3" drive sub-systems for
Coco and Apple ][.
I am sure I've seen them on a Beeb too...
* SA1000, ST412, or ST506-interface Winchester
hard drives (with
adapter board). So that'll be basically all the 20-year-old heavy iron
that doesn't have a DEC sticker on it :)
25 years, maybe. 20 years would have to include "RLL" and
ESDI (RLL has same cabling as
ST412, but different encoding and data-rates? , ESDI cabling looks the
Eh? RLL is a date encoding scheme, ST412 is a de-facto stadnard for the
signals on the drive interface connectors. They are not the same thing at
all.
Yes, you cna use RLL encoding on an ST412-type of drive. And one many
other tyeps of drive. The reason the PC crowd used to talk about MFM nd
RLL drives (meaning drive systems that used those encodings on a
ST412-type of interface) is that in general the encoding system only
matters to the user on a 'raw' interface, and the ST412 was the only
common raw interface used on PCs.
same but has signal differences)
It's very different... For one thing the data separator is in the drive
(meaning the encoding method doesn't matter to the end user). FOr
another, head position, etc, is done by sending a command bit-serially to
the drive.
-tony