modern removable media drives

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu Nov 12 18:31:12 1998

I wrote about the problems with "modern" removable-rigid-media drives:
>> Air filters? Ha! They have nothing but a shutter on the cartridge and a
>> door flap on the drive. Absolute rubbish. It's miraculous that they work
>> even for a few weeks.

"Hans Franke" <franke_at_sbs.de> wrote:
> Dame has been said on 8" FD: These will be damaged within hours

Same?

No, no one with a grasp of how the technology works has ever claimed that a
little dust or smoke will damage a floppy disk or drive. Floppy disks use a
much different head/media interface than winchester rigid-media drives. Dust
or smoke particles can and will cause head crashes on winchester drives.

I am not a technical expert on the innards of Iomega Jaz and Syquest SyJet
and Sparq drives. However, a casual examination suggests that they use
winchester technology. This is consistent with the manufacturers descriptions
of the drives in product literature, and it is also consistent with the
high failure rate I've observed (approaching 100% after four weeks on the
Syquest drives). Winchester drive technology was developed for permanently
sealed HDAs, not cartridge drives. And even the sealed drives were designed
with air filtration.

Someone pointed out that he'd had no trouble with Syquest 230M drives; I've
personally had reasonable results with their earlier 44M and 88M 5.25 inch
drives. I don't what differences between the lower and higher capacity
drives accounts for the huge difference in reliability.

Eric
Received on Thu Nov 12 1998 - 18:31:12 GMT