Evotek Winchester Harddisk

[Tom Gardner]

Sorry If I didn't make myself clear, I am suggesting one never acquire an Evotek drive today other than perhaps as an historical curiosity.

 

The Finch was a short lived 8-inch HDD that went up to 42 MB unformatted BUT according to Disk/Trend It did not use an ST506 interface but instead came with this  variety of interfaces: Finch, LDI, SMD or SA1000!  So your problem is likely to be finding a drive that matches the interface of yr controller card.   Some possibilities

·         Finch interface was available on certain CDC Wren 5½-inch models, e.g. 9415

·         SA1000 interface was available on the 8-inch Quantum Q2000

·         SMD interface was available on CDC 8-inch FSD models; e.g., 9715

·         I have no idea what LDI was

BTW the ST506 interface is a copy of SA1000 interface with the major difference being a slightly higher data rate so any ST506 might actually work but the problem might be low level formatting due to the unexpected track length.  Depends upon the formatting utility

 

If u know what interface u need I can suggest models

 

Tom

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Oliver Lehmann [mailto:lehmann at ans-netz.de] 
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2015 3:55 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Evotek Winchester Harddisk

 

 

Tom Gardner < <mailto:t.gardner at computer.org> t.gardner at computer.org> wrote:

 

> The Evotek drive initially used the notoriously unreliable Ampex Alar 

> plated media; whether they ever upgraded to sputtered media is 

> uncertain.  It probably should be avoided.

> 

> I would look for an replacement drive using oxide media.  The nice 

> thing about oxide media is it came pre-corroded so that's one thing 

> not to worry about in a 35 year old drive

 

OK, but I'm not looking for a replacement for en Evotek harddisk, but for a CDC FINCH harddisk. These drives seem to be so rare - I would not even care about the media the disks where made of ;) And - I found nothing "compatible" so far to replace them with other harddisks.