Parallel port hard drives?

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Tue Mar 28 16:37:08 2000

On Mar 28, 19:14, Tony Duell wrote:

> The other thing is that when 96 tpi drives were in common use, some
(lesser)
> manufactuerers fitted the narrow head to all drives (even 48 tpi ones!).
> Or at least some system builders/OEMs did. I have heard rumours that a
> well-known BBC micro supplier sold 40 track, 80 track, and 40/80
> switchable drives. They were actually all the same (80 track, 96 tpi)
> mechanisms. The '40 track' ones had been modified to double-step, and the
> switchable ones had this mod controlled by the switch.

Canon mechanisms, by any chance? or Chinon?

> Needless to say, these '40 track' drives can correctly read '40 track'
> disks that have been overwritten by 96 tpi drives (since the head in such
> a drive only 'sees' the narrower 96-tpi-like track anyway), but what they
> can't do is overwrite disks formatted or written on real 48 tpi drives.
> Don't ask how I got to sort this out!

Yuk! I can imagine :-)

> The other question, of course, is how reliable do you need it to be.
>
> For example, the last time I wrote a 40 track disk in an 80 track (96
> tpi) drive was when I wrote a TRS-80 Model 4 boot disk on this linux box
> (which has a 1.2Mbyte 96 tpi drive). I did the following :

yes, i do things like that quite often. But not for anything I want to
keep (not the one written in the 80-track drive, anyway) because you never
know if the drive you use next year will be the same...

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York
Received on Tue Mar 28 2000 - 16:37:08 BST

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