WD Chip Info

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Tue May 11 00:46:59 1999

Actually, I do believe they both supported the length of ECC suitable for
correction, but only the 2010 could interact properly with the 1014 to
perform the correction. Why the 1014 was required in place of host-driver
code, I can't say. One could set the ecc length to either 32 or 56 bits,
and the latter was required for correction. I didn't figure this out until
the details on the PC-based WDFMT program were published, indicating that
the 1010 would support either length, though it was common knowledge that
only 2010 was actually error-correction-capable. It was never clear to me
how the 1014 was going to help with the correction. Apparently it became no
less burdensome to effect correction in the host interface code,
particularly when the scotched the whole notion of bothering with
correction. I don't recall any controller actually going ahead and doing it
as part of the drivers. Somebody did publish an error scrubbing app-note
though.

Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, May 10, 1999 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: WD Chip Info


>> WD2010B - This is the HDC chip, similar to the 1010. Does
>I wrote:
>> Drop-in replacement for the 1010, with ECC. Also can support >1024
>> cylinders, helpful with the Maxtor XT1140 and Maxtor XT2190 disk drives
>
>Minor clarification: the chip is a drop in replacement, but if you do
that,
>I think the drive needs to be reformatted, since the 1010 only uses a CRC
>rather then the longer ECC code.
Received on Tue May 11 1999 - 00:46:59 BST