15 May
2007
15 May
'07
6:13 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
You didn't mention if you were using a 48tpi
("360K") drive to read
these or trying to get by on a 96tpi ("720K" or "1.2MB) drive. The
former will usually produce better results.
Is that true? I almost had this discussion with Dave a couple of weeks ago (I
was thinking it might be nice in the Imagedisk archive format recorded the
double step flag setting in the file to provide a hint as to the drive type
[1] used)
My theory (which I don't think I ever got around to explaining to Dave) was
that the head in a 40-cylinder drive would be better equipped to read a
*marginal* signal from a 48TPI disk than an 80-cylinder double-stepped drive,
purely due to the head width.
Then I got to thinking that maybe that was utter crap :-)
[1] I'm with Dave in that I think it would be wrong to restrict the recreation
of an archive based upon the drive type that created it. However, I do tend to
favour as much (automatic) recording of the parameters that were in use when
data is created as possible.