On 3/24/14 6:24 AM, cctech at vax-11.org wrote: Quantum ProDrive LPS, or any Apple-labeled ATA drive. I think <1gb are starting to dry up, haven't seen many at Weird Stuff in a while. There should be tons of them out there somewhere coming out of Performas.

On 3/24/14 9:31 AM, allison wrote: quite possible, this may have been a change for ATA-2 ? http://ipindex.homelinux.net/link/manuals/quantum_prodrive170AT/3409.TXT All of Quantum's disk drives designed for PCs now support Fast ATA, and new products with Fast ATA support will be introduced in early 1995. The drives are also fully backward compatible with older ATA/ IDE (non-Fast ATA) BIOS. The Quantum drives support both the Extended CHS (Cylinder Head Sector) and LBA (Logical Block Address) addressing methods in overcoming the 528 MB DOS capacity barrier. Quantum drives can also be used with dual host adapters. Finally, there are no incompatibilities with Quantum hard drives that would prevent computer systems from supporting non-hard drive peripherals. Quantum drives that support Fast ATA include the following families: Quantum ProDrive LPS 170/210/340/420 Quantum ProDrive LPS 270/540 Quantum Maverick 270/540 Quantum Lightning 365/540/730 Quantum Daytona 127/170/256/341/514

My mind isn't coming up with the name of the software or reference but wasn't there a huge hardware database program with hundreds or thousands of hard drive specs listed? Maybe that implies they're all CHS though. I think the name was pretty simple though. Something hardware Reference? Not that much help I know. Sent from my iPhone /////c

On 03/31/2014 09:48 PM, Sam Onella wrote: Reminds me of Corporate Systems Center's Hard Drive Bible. When I got a copy, it was a three-ring binder full of specs on MFM and ESDI drives. Looks like you can browse the 8th edition on Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/CSC_Hard_Drive_Bible_Edition_8_1996 Wow, they really expanded this thing in later years... --Steve.

And I forgot to mention add real pictures of surviving drives like http://www.collection.archivist.info/archive/hdinfo/viewdrivedetails.php?ma… Dave Caroline On 01/04/2014, Dave Caroline <dave.thearchivist at gmail.com> wrote:

On 04/01/2014 01:52 AM, Dave Caroline wrote: Text files... There's also the big SunOS "format.dat" file that was organized from the sunmanagers mailing list. Looks like it's available here: ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/sunmanagers/format.dat Should cover various SMD, IPI, SCSI, and some ESDI/MFM drives as seen through SCSI bridge boards. --S.

On 04/01/2014 04:52 AM, Dave Caroline wrote: Interesting but mostly useless for my effort. No data on LBA support only suggested configs (CHS) and Largely FM/EDSI/SCSI. If I needed to know what drive I have could be used in XT class or AT class with WD100x interface it would be very useful. The info needed was specific, what IDE/ATA drives under 1gb preferably 512mb support LBA? I ended up testing about 20 drives and all under 420mb tested did not support LBA. In the end I selected Toshiba/IBM 2.5" 1gb as I have a few and they did test as valid for LBA. Now I can actually start the real task. Allison

On 04/01/2014 12:31 PM, Al Kossow wrote: Other than the Prodrives you mentioned (over 250M and after 1995), St3660A, WD520MB (also dated coded 1995 or later). I had one 740 and one 820mb 2.5" that also did. And a segate(memory test) tidbit 2.5" thick (old laptop) drive that didn't do LBA but does 8bit transfer. I passed on all of them as I needed a minimum two and preferably the same. The 3660As and the Toshiba/IBMs fit the bill. The Toshibas were picked as they only needed 5V to simplify life further. The project is CP/M related. CPU will be Z80. Allison

On 04/01/2014 09:52 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: Later versions (e.v. VIII) came with a CD also. Since I've never looked at the CD, I don't know what's on it. Perhaps Mike Farris' hard drive index has more information? http://mfarris.com/hard/1776.html --Chuck

On 23 Mar 2014, at 20:00, allison <ajp166 at verizon.net> wrote: [...] I concur that LBA is the way forwards when it comes to the data structures in your operating system, but sadly CHS is very much more common in small drives and you?re just going to have to put up with it if you need to support small disks. I recently went through all of my old disks and did wonder why I was having trouble reading some of them. It turned out that my USB-PATA bridge couldn?t cope with disks that didn?t support LBA, which turned out to be all of my tiny disks. I concluded that I don?t want to bother with small disks any more. At a guess, you want to avoid CHS because divmod operations are extremely expensive on the Z80 and also a chore to implement from scratch. However, in the specific cases of division by 255 and 63, it?s not quite as horrific as it sounds, as you can do fixed-point multiplications by 1/255 and 1/63. The binary value of 1/255 is a particularly pleasing 0x0.010101... and thus quite cheap. However disks presenting as 63 sectors and 255 heads will be relatively large and probably also support LBA, making such an approach moot. Why are you discounting large drives? If you?ve got a design limitation in your code, just ignore sectors beyond that point. Your tools that probe the drive?s capacity (i.e. the partitioner and/or mkfs) need to be aware that they may see a size beyond the limit and thus need to truncate it, but other than that you can ignore the extra space. 4.3GB is also a curious figure: it?s roughly 2**32 bytes which is how the Amiga ended up with that limitation. It?s also the number of sectors that would fit into a signed 24 bit int, but if you?re writing this from scratch, you can easily make that unsigned or extend to 32 bits to let you address drives up to 8MiB and 2TiB respectively. (Although you can?t get PATA drives anything like as large as 2TiB, and if you?re using LBA28 commands, you?ll not see space beyond 128GiB anyway.) [...] If you are trying to avoid both CHS and large disks because it?s too hard to implement, you are going to get some unpleasant surprises from other hardware as well. Were you planning to drive a printer or serial device? ;)