On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Lawrence Walker wrote:
I picked up an HDD made for the Atari ST by ICD.
It is a shoebox form and
has space and connectors for 2 HDs. The highly proprietory HD interface by
Atari (ATASCI ?) is usually directly converted to SCSI in most newer HD adapter
interfaces for STs.
In the Atari and ICD HDs the DMA output was converted to SCSI by an ICD card
and then to MFM or DLL. via an Adaptec 4004 (MFM) or 4070(RLL) controller.
This one has an Adaptec 4070. The 1 drive present is a Miniscribe 3834P .
I understand that some MFM drives could be coded by a RLL controller if
they were fast enough, etc. I have an ST4096, which according to the specs I
have seen is an 80 meg MFM , as well as several other smaller MFM HDs.
According to a spec sheet the 4096 would work with Perstor Systems ADRT
controllers to double the storage which would seem to indicate it was of high
enough speed and quality to stand the tighter coding.. Anyone know if this is
also true with an RLL controller or what MFM drives do work with RLL ?
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com
Larry, I have had good luck with any Maxtor MFM, a number of NEC 5126
drives, and even the odd ST225. In my experience, if it will accept the
low level format, it will probably work OK.
- don
Thanks Don. The main thing I wanted to know was if an MFM would indeed accept
RLL encoding. Your answer seems like a qualified yes. At least it shouldn't
screw up the HDD. I'll try the 4096 (I never knew MFM even went to that high
a capacity) and if that doesn't work I'm pretty sure I have a couple of ST225s.
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com