1 Jul
2010
1 Jul
'10
9:58 a.m.
On 1 Jul 2010 at 12:29, Dave McGuire wrote:
For a time about ten years ago, the 5.25"
Bernoulli drives were
appearing at scrappers by the hundreds. I really regret not having
grabbed a drive or two. They'd be very handy now for PDP-11 hacking.
Even the 5.25" units were built like tanks. I still have a dual 90MB
unit here that occasionally sees use. The largest made was, what,
230MB?
I think the thing that doomed them was the price--they weren't cheap
and the bytes-per-buck got to be too low for competition.
The same with MO drives probably holds. I may still have a Pinnacle
Apex 4.3GB drive here somewhere. In addition to being somewhat
delicate, it was very expensive when compared to a standard IDE
drive.
I don't consider the later cheap removable-media drives like Zip,
Jaz, Sparq... to be in the same reliability category as the
Bernoullis. It's a shame that the technology was abandoned.
--Chuck