Back in the mid-80's I had a Quantum Q2020 16mb 8" hard drive with a
bolt-on SASI controller. It gave this behomoth a 50-pin sasi jack to
which I connected my Atari's BlackBox host adapter. I don't remember who
made the controller board.
It had a huge power supply hanging off it's side, and a 'smoked' plastic
bubble covering the platters. You could see the mech working if you shone
a light through the plastic. Despite the !ouch! mechanical warning
stickers all over it, it ran very quitely.
I just loved that drive. :-)
Unlike the scsi drives which I also ran on my Black Box and/or MIO scsi
host adapters, this Sasi drive did not map-out it's own bad sectors.
After formatting (special program), you would run a high-level scan of the
drive's surface. The program put a special file in the root of the drive
which 'occupied' all of the bad sectors on the drive.
Also, the Konan DJ-210, WD1002SHD, and both Xebec S1410 controllers were
Bridge adapters from ST506/412 to SASI. You used LUNs to run more than one
mech on the bridge (except WD1002 only 1 drive) just like a SCSI bridge.
I know the BB and MIO interfaces for the atari ran both, but I'm wondering
if today's PC host adapters will run really old devices like those old
bridge controllers?
Rambling.....
Jeff
In <3A24B0FF.DC02BC15_at_atc.creative.com>, on 11/29/00
at 12:49 PM, Peter Johnson <pete_at_atc.creative.com> said:
From the period, the only drives
>that I know of with integrated controllers were either SCSI or SASI. I
>thought that SASI was only used by Shuggart. The PC versions did not
>appear until about 1988 (later than the 9153/9154), and I doubt that HP
>(at that time) would have use the PC types anyway.
>At some point, I will pull the integrated controller board off the disk
>and look to see if any standard parts were used. Also, the chips that I
>can see on the main board in the drive seem to use HP ASICs (an 84 and a
>68 pin CQFP).
>-Pete
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Received on Wed Nov 29 2000 - 11:49:45 GMT