Atari hard drives? The actual Atari Answer :)

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Thu Jun 4 19:22:38 1998

<Wait, are ST-506 drives the ones with a wide ribbon connector
<and a narrow one? If so, they are pretty common here. I have a bunch

Yes and so is EDSI!

<in my desk drawer. BTW, why is MFM so much more popular than RLL?

RLL tended to push the drive and if the bit jitter was high there would
be lots of bad blocks. Drives of that time using non servo positioners
were doing their best but they were on the way out for their own reasons
like being slow and tending toward higer error rates from wear. This
combined with arriving late on the scene, and EDSI gaining popularity
and other details sorta made it's life short. While RLL did die for
drives using seperate controllers it is nearly standard for IDE and SCSI
drives (we cant see it).

Disk and controller technology were playing catchup with each other
through the 80s.

Allison
Received on Thu Jun 04 1998 - 19:22:38 BST

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