6 Nov
2007
6 Nov
'07
12:32 p.m.
Write trim erase is a signal to the head assembly
(driver) that turns on
the erase segment of the head for erasing the area either side of the head.
It's also called tunnel erase. This gives some tolerence to off track reading
as the intertrack gaps are "clean". Tunnel erase is still part of all
floppy drives but is activated by Write-enable and you never "hear" of it.
In 1976 all this was new and magical until Sugart came out with the much
simplified 5.25 SA400.
From reading the information on the Internet I have pretty much
guessed that much, that it was done automatically on new drives.
Any comments or
ideas on the idea? Is it worth trying? I've got a
very weird tarbell card that formats and uses 3.5" disks as a 70k
mini floppy. I guess anything is possible. : )
Myself I'd persue something using a 5.25 or 3.5" drive with a current
softsector interface to the drive and enough CPU smarts to fake looking
like the Altair interface which was dumb as a rock and depended on the
8080 to do most everything.