Sigh, progresss is.....

I'm not the OP, but by the late 80's my impression was that even the best of the MFM drives were pretty crappy in terms of reliability. In the early 90's in the minicomputer surplus streams good SMD and then ESDI drives and then SCSI became available (not necessarily free but affordable) and the best of these were built like tanks. In the mid-90's in the PC-clone surplus streams MFM drives were a dime a dozen. But most had never been in a 5150, they were from clones of the early AT era before IDE took over in that market. While putting a MFM hard drive into a 5150 was possible in any number of ways and certainly the power users did so, the vast majority of institutional 5150's (ones owned by businesses, hospitals, governments, schools) I saw were never taken beyond floppy drives. Every so often I'd see one with no floppies, just the cassette interface :-), those are the ones I took note of! Probably bought by the "power loser" instead of the "power user" crowd... the line could be incredibly thin sometimes! Tim.