Merle K. Peirce wrote:
>
> I know the later drives seemed much more compact, about the size of a
> floppy drive. Those early ones were enormous though. I've never
> opened
> one up though, so I wasn't sure what it contained. I suspected some sort
> of 8 inch drive.
There are three form factors for external Tandy hard drive cases.
The earliest were the 8.4 Mb, it was huge with an 8" Shugart unit
inside. These drives were not compatible with any other (later)
Tandy drives or controllers, nor could their controller be used
with any other drives.
The most common line are in a somewhat smaller (but still quite
large) case, containing a full-height 5.25" unit. THese came in
sizes of 5, 12, 15, 35 and 70 Mb. Any primary drive in this series
can work with up to three secondaries of whatever capacity. These
were the drives where the card inside the Model 2/12/16/6000 was
essentially an adapter to give the machine an expansion bus
identical to that of the Model 3/4, these same drives connected to
those machines with a cable straight through from the edge connector
in the 3/4 to the header connector on the primary drive case. The
6000HD or other machine with the internal HD could connect to only
one secondary drive.
About the time I left Tandy, they came out with a smaller external
case, primarily for the Tandy 1000, there were adapters available to
connect them to the Model 3/4 and the Tandy 2000. I don't know the
nature of the adapters, I never used one. They held a half-height
5.25 unit. I recall they were originally 10 Mb.
Oh yeah, the CoCo HD adapter RomPak also connected to the second
series. I never got one, the HD controllers on my CoCo 3s are not
Tandy issue.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram_at_cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
Received on Sun Apr 11 1999 - 10:06:39 BST