There's no "if" any more, Ebay will no longer be accepting checks and money order as viable forms of payment: http://pages.ebay.com/sell/August2008Update/OtherFAQ/#3 Quoting Michael Hart <imsaicollector at yahoo.com>:

There has been a lot of activity recently among the Apple II/IIgs crowd about using the combination of a cheap SCSI to IDE bridge and an IDE to CF adapter to use Compact Flash memory cards in their computers. This apparently is working quite well and after doing some research I've seen examples of people using this set up to replace dead SCSI drives in vintage Macs, Suns and at least one NeXT workstation. There is a vendor selling these adapters for $30 each. The eBay item # is 350044078177. I did some digging and the documentation can be found here: http://dl.acard.com/manual/english/aec-7720u&uw.pdf I hope you folks can use this to revive some bit of rare hardware that needed a new hard disk. :) I'm now looking to get one or two 8 bit ISA SCSI boards that I can use in a couple of 5160 PC/XT machines I've got. They need to be "bootable" cards. If you have one or two you want to part with, please contact me off list. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Chuck Guzis wrote: There are also CF to SD adapters (I've been seeing them in my trolling on eBay today). There are also the CF form-factor microdrives, but those are getting scarce too I suspect. Neither have I, but I haven't researched it much. What's the write-cycle endurance of a SD card? g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

In my z50 (which I'm not using at the moment because the 32M RAM addon croaked, so it's got only 16M instead of 48M, which is close to crippling) I use a Seagate "8G" (actually about 7.5G) microdrive. It mostly works fine, but it runs rather hot when it's under even moderately intensive use (eg, building a new kernel); I suspect it is designed for a duty cycle in the 10-20 percent range, max. Depends. If it does wear leveling (which I understand almost all of them do), it becomes a lot more than it appears to be. For example, if my "8G" microdrive were 8G of CF instead, and had (say) a write cycle count of 250K writes, that would mean I shouldn't expect it to wear out until after I've written approximately 250K * 8G, which is roughly 2PB. I don't know what microdrive throughput is like (never measured it on my z50), but at the approximately 7M/s I'm seeing right now to a "real" disk I'm doing the write phase of a write-read-compare test over, it takes over 9.7 years to transfer 2PB - and that means 7M/s sustained for the whole 9.7+ years. That's best-case, not (for example) taking into account that many writes are smaller than the underlying flash's blocksize. But even if you derate it by an order of magnitude, it's still a lot. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

That's why I said that in the context of devices which did their own wear leveling: mutating the mapping between blocks as seen by the host and blocks in the underlying flash so as to spread the writes around is what wear leveling _is_. If the floppy was made recently, /dev/null approaches the reliability of a floppy. :( /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, Doc Shipley wrote: Doc, there's a whole pile of Amiga users out there (found 'em today!) that would argue that point with you. They're using them a lot on the Amiga 1200, 500 and 2000 without issue. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

Gene Buckle wrote: If you run Linux with the CF marked as a normal HD, it will cause issues (any file access will touch the FS), but I think the newer Linux kernels have an option to turn that off for certain drives. I can vouch that running Linux with a CF does not kill the card, at least when configured to use CF. Pyramid Linux is a special distro used for folks who want to gateway their cellular air cards to Wifi. It mounts the entire OS as read-only, with a small RAM disk to handle logs and stuff that needs to be R/W. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

On 25 Sep 2008 at 17:31, Alexander Schreiber wrote: Fine; would you run such as setup as a mailserver? Are there Linuces that will perform write-cycle leveling? If I only need a few hundred MB to operate, I can throw in a 32GB CF card and be very happy if the system performs leveling. If CF cards don't perform leveling themselves, is there a gizmo that can be installed between the CF card and the IDE interface that will do the block remapping? Sorry for the stream of questions, but my only hands-on design experience has been with traditional "dumb naked" flash. I simply don't know how "smart" CF cards are. Cheers, Chuck

On 25 Sep 2008 at 12:41, Doc Shipley wrote: A little poking around on the web shows that at least some "industrial grade" CF cards contain wear leveling, but the CFA spec (http://www.compactflash.org) only mentions "defect management", which is a whole different bucket of fish. What the lower-end consumer devices do is anyone's guess. Here's the rub--JFFS2 is *not* recommended for CF or USB flash drives. Here's the text from http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/jffs2.html#L_stick_jffs2 "I am going to use JFFS2 on top of my USB stick/CF card/etc, is it OK? USB sticks, CompactFlash cards and other removable flash media are not MTD devices. They are block devices. They do contain flash chip inside, but they also contain some translation layer above which emulates block device. This translation layer is implemented in hardware. So for outside world these devices look exactly as hard drives, not like MTD devices. Please, read this FAQ entry about using JFFS2 on top of hard drives. So, the answer is probably yes, you technically can, but be sure you realize why you do this. In general it is bad idea. It is much better to use any conventional file system like ext2. Also note, these devices are "black boxes". The way they implement this flash-to-block device translation layer is not usually published. And in many cases the algorithms used at this layer are far from brilliant. For example, many USB sticks and other cards lose data in case of unclean reboots/power cuts. So, be very careful. " So, if I want to replace legacy IDE drives with CF, it doesn't sound like JFFS2 is a good idea. Nor is it clear that all CF cards do wear leveling. Perhaps you can understand my confusion. There are situations where I'd really like to use CF in place of existing rotating mass storage in legacy applications, but the weasel words make me very chary. Cheers, Chuck

Alexander Schreiber wrote: Just because the device is solid-state doesn't mean you should ignore journaling. The host computer can still abort halfway through a write and bork the filesystem. *That* is great advice for a CF. Most people miss that. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Alexander Schreiber wrote: One small word of caution - some filesystem cleanup utilities evaluate "unused" files by atime. RedHat and AIX both do, although both by default limit cleanup to /tmp, /var/tmp, man-page cache directories, etc. If you have the cleanup tools tweaked aggressively and turn on noatime, you'll notice in about 30 days. :) Doc

Alexander Schreiber wrote: ... or after n reboots, where n is designed to fall at the moment of maximum incovenience... :-) I tend to run ext3 on any linux system of mine, which seems to do a very good job at not disappearing up its own backside. I did try reiserfs for a while until the whole filesystem on my development system decided to eat itself - never again. Although at least with ext3 - and probably other journaled filesystems - you can specify that the journal resides on a completely different device. How useful that is in practice, I'm not sure - but you don't *have* to have the journal stored on the same device as the associated data. Before I left the UK, I'd replaced the IDE drive in my main data recovery system with a CF card (a lowly 32MB, too, as data was all stored remotely via the network), but unfortunately I didn't get chance to really hammer the card before I left, and it might be a while before the machine catches up with me... cheers Jules

Alexander Schreiber wrote: Not just Sun. Those Prestoserve cards were available for a variety of architectures. I have a few for DEC PMAX, at least one for IBM RS/6000, and I had heard they were available for HP/9000 machines. Peace... Sridhar

On 25 Sep 2008 at 17:31, Jim Leonard wrote: Back to a old query--will a Microdrive stand up to months of continuous 24x7 use? My impression was that they were useful only as intermittent-use devices. It seems that if flash was ready for primetime, the server farm operators would jump at the chance to employ them, given that power consumption is a *big* expense for them (both for system power and the HVAC that's needed). But they're not jumping, are they? Cheers, Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: As a matter of fact, IBM's new blades have a flash socket (more like a SODIMM than CF form factor) for boot media. VMware has a new variant of ESX Server that's designed to run from flash. Doc

On 26 Sep 2008 at 0:02, Jim Leonard wrote: I have a feeling that microdrives may fail catastrophically more often than with "soft" failures, but I can't back that up. So, maybe I should put one of the "industrial strength" CFs to the test on a mailserver. For purposes of testing, I could hook on a hard disk and back new mail up to it periodically. If the CF bites the dust suddenly, at least I wouldn't miss much. As I understand things, the "industrial" CFs use SLC and implement real wear-leveling algorithms (although no manufacturer will disclose what said algorithms might be). I think I'll do a bit more fact-checking and see what I can set up for a trial. Cheers, Chuck

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 05:31:52PM -0500, Jim Leonard wrote: Most, not all. Running e2fsck against a device that is read-only and misses its second half causes e2fsck to die painfully - BTST. Besides, if the data was important, you have current backups, right? And if it is just the machine setup, you have the package list and a backup of the config files, correct? ;-) Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

Alexander Schreiber wrote: I understand that, but I read that more work had been done in this area and there was a new functionality that was even better than noatime. Maybe in general, but Pyramid itself is trivial to install. You dd to a CF, and boot. there are commands (mountrw and mountro) so you can remount the fs for config file updates and such. Jim

Chuck Guzis wrote: I missed this first time around. Of 20 or 30 CF cards I've used, only one was bad out of the box, and I think a flaky connection killed that one. Of the last 100-count tray of floppies I bought, at least 15 didn't survive the first format, and another dozen or so didn't live through the second overwrite. That's my math and I'm sticking to it. Doc

Chuck Guzis wrote: That's a loaded question - even if the CF card survives 40 times as many write cycles, it's going to die first. :) I don't know, although I would bet on the CF card handling more cycles than an 8" floppy. I thought you were talking about currently available media, and that's not even a contest. Doc

Wear should be "bits and pieces" -- more specifically, individual sectors fail. Then again, I've seen whole CF failures, too. paul

Chuck Guzis wrote: Is that a drive with or without wear-leveling circuitry? ;) I thought CF cards were normally good for about 10k write ops - I'm not sure you could get that out of an unattended floppy drive, but maybe it's possible assuming scheduled maintenance (i.e. cleaning the drive heads)

Alexander Schreiber wrote: Hehe, I think I have two boxes of 5.25 soft sectored disks of that brand, still in the shrinkwrap. Since they are so infamous, is anyone interested in them? I threw them in the pilke to go to the local CBM show this weekend, but could pull them out. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

Alexander Schreiber wrote: Heh. I got into the habit of making multiple copies of things onto the same disk - quite often I'd get home and find that the 'main' copy was faulty, but that one of the backups read OK. I don't think I ever found that all of my copies were dead (thus needing me to assemble things using good sectors from different copies) Times when the entire disk just went south seemed pretty rare, thankfully. (Incidentally I used to get 3.5" DD BASF media for free, and rarely had any problems with that - but the HD stuff was a nightmare) cheers Jules

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Alexander Schreiber wrote: Anybody else remember the 2/3 height 5.25" drives that BASF peddled in 1979? High DOA rate.

On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: There were quite a few. But, the first 1/3 height 5.25" drive(s) that I saw was a 2/3 height Canon 720K DOUBLE drive (two disk slots in one drive) It had button eject. The early ones, with ONE stepper were really neat for duplicating disks IFF you wrote software for them. Using software that was unaware of the nature of the drive made for a helluva lot of recalibrating seeks.

And thusly were the wise words spake by Jules Richardson I remember using Compaq computers that had floppy drives matching your description. Cheers, Bryan

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 11:18:24AM -0400, Bryan Pope wrote: Remex did a version. -- - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 11:48:51AM -0400, Roy J. Tellason wrote: ... I didn't want to mention that, we had a "pet name" for them, starting with 'l'. -- - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db

On Friday 26 September 2008 12:37, David Griffith wrote: I may even have one or two of those. And some of those 3.5" drives that would mount directly into a 5.25" bay... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

----- Original Message ----- From: "Joachim Thiemann" <joachim.thiemann at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 1:25 PM Subject: Re: 1/2 height 5.25" floppy drives (was: BASF) I think Epson and canon did also, I know I have atleast 2 different makes of those combo drives.

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 01:25:07PM -0400, Joachim Thiemann wrote: Me, too. It's mounted in a 486/DX-66 in a mini-tower that just doesn't have a lot of places to mount disk drives. I think it's full with a FD-505, a CD-ROM, and a single disk. At a certain point in time, it was a very handy item, then 5.25" floppies fell out of daily use right after... -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 26-Sep-2008 at 23:00 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -69.9 F (-56.6 C) Windchill -108.6 F (-78.1 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 12.8 kts Grid 7 Barometer 678.8 mb (10674 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

David Griffith wrote: Anybody know if a 3.5" 5.25" HH combo drive was made in DD format (vs HD). I have 2 or 3 combo drives... all HD. Wonder if these came out late enough that there never was a DD version. -- Curt

On 26 Sep 2008 at 18:22, David Griffith wrote: My Teac OEM info says that the FD155 came only in the GF version (i.e. 1.2M/720K). I don't know about any other brands. Cheers, Chuck

These sound like Epson (all apart from the uneliability part, I've never had problems with them). Epson made a 1/2 height drive with a conventional stepper motor positioner (used in many Torch machines, includinf the XXX) and also a 1/3 height drive used in the QX10 (and the TF20 floppy unit for the Epson laptops) that had a voice coil positioner, a bit like a miniature RK05 (!). The only curious thing about the latter is that they have a belt driven spindle (prsumably to get the height down, there wasn't space to fit the motor in-line with the spindle. And that spidle motor has some curios feature, I forget what, but I do rememebr having to dismantle the FG (tacho) coil to extract the ends aftre they broke off when I was doing somethign to the motor.... -tony

BASF made very bad audio tapes in the 60'th and 70'th , after a few years the powder came off the tape. But as I recall BASF media was rebranded to 3M in the 90'th with is now rebranded to imagination. -Rik -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] Namens Christian Corti Verzonden: vrijdag 26 september 2008 10:51 Aan: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Onderwerp: Re: SCSI to IDE bridges... On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Alexander Schreiber wrote: bad. And this is an urban legend since all my BASF floppies are (still) good. They weren't worse than floppies from any other brand. Anyways, they don't produce any magnetic media since a couple of years any more. Christian

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] Namens Christian Corti Verzonden: zondag 28 september 2008 11:21 Aan: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Onderwerp: RE: SCSI to IDE bridges... Mea Culpa, You're right , BASF became EMTEC they sold the media part to EMTEC, and SCOTCH became 3M and so on.. EMTEC still exits and is making all kinds of media. But may be the quality of their tape is climate or location dependend ;-) Mine where not the best tapes, lots of dead spots and layerdust coming of. But thats in the past all my tapes and audio stuf was burned in a fire 15 years ago with a very large amount of classic radios and a collection of Compucorp and Diehl calculators ;-( Just one Diehl Alphatronic and some manuals were saved.. -Rik

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 10:50:30AM +0200, Christian Corti wrote: Funny that, I _did_ have a nice stack of floppies from BASF dying on me. And I do remember them to be worse than others. Maybe that is why they got out of the magnetic media market? *g* Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

CF cards are still being used in the brand new high-end/pro Nikon Camera's (not sure about brands). I'm really drooling over the Sandisk Extreme IV cards with Firewire reader, have been for months, but haven't wanted to spend the $$$'s yet. Zane

Jerome Fine replies: The US $30 is the buy now price. There are over 500 units available. These units seems to be ONLY the SCSI to IDE bridge cards. For the IDE to CF bridge cards, there are a number of sources available. There are also a number of options available for the actual CF cards. Since I haven't used any myself, I don't have any details. However, I am aware that not all applications are compatible with all of the different hardware that is available. Therefore, until a set of all 3 components is shown to actually work in a given environment, I suggest that it is best to not assume that everything will automatically work. One of the advantages of the IDE to CF card is that at least some of them have indicator lights to display any activity that is taking place. In addition, they range up to 32 GB in size and some have a 5 year warranty. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine

My bridges were shipped just a few minutes ago - when I get them, (and I get an 8 Bit SCSI card for my XT)) I'll report back how it works. I've got an Adaptec 1542 I can test as well, but I need to burn a new set of BIOS roms for my AT first - the revision it has doesn't support drive type 47. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

Ian King wrote: Well that ends my usage too as a buyer on ebay. I guess e-bay just wants to sell the latest CD's , IPods and $10K audio interconnects.

David Griffith wrote: That is not the problem... Ebay's check out will be set up only to take pay-pal as the only way to pay in the menu system.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Ian King wrote: That's why I've always specified that I'll take only US Post Office money orders. From well-established customers, many of whom are on this list, I take checks. <shrug> -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Erik Klein wrote: ----- My Reply ----- Nothing in the UK, though. I actually prefer to go and pick stuff up from eBay sellers if they're close enough, and pay cash. If they're in the US or the Far East that's obviously not an option so I use paypal. I probably buy half a dozen things a month, with no significant problems yet. Gordon