Dick, you're right of course. I guess I should have explained better.
Intel offered two differnt drive sets for the MDS 800. One uses CDC drives.
The other uses Shugart drives. The controller that comes with the CDC
drives is marked "CDC". You'll note that that's what in the one that's up
for auction. The controller that comes with the Shugart dirves is different
and isn't marked except for a PWA number. The CDC drive combination
reads/writes SD only. The Shugart drive combination reads/writes M2MFM
only. The CDC drive setup uses a different cable than the one used in the
Shugart drive arrangement.
******That and the use of only one typoe controller with each brand of
drive leads me to believe that the interfaces are different and the drives
are not interchangeable. *****
Joe
At 03:28 PM 2/14/02 -0700, you wrote:
>The floppy drives don't care at all what the modulation scheme ( FM, M^2FM,
>MFM, GCR ... ) happens to be. They simply cough up a pulse whenever they see
>a flux reversal. The controller cares, however. Consequently, one would
>conclude that any drive at all would work. However, the options that the
>controller expects to be enabled on the drives can make a big difference, and
>failure to enable even one of them can render the controller-drive
combination
>useless.
>
>Dick
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Joe" <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
>To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
>Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 11:03 AM
>Subject: FA: Intel MDS-800
>
>
>> <http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2002926621>. He
>> has no docs, drives or software with it. Damm! and I just threw out a drive
>> chassis that went with this one! FWIW it uses CDC drives like these
>> <http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/mds-800/cdc-dr-f.jpg>. I don't know if
>> Shugart drives can be made to work with his controller cards or not But
>> Intel uses a different connecting cable and a different set of controller
>> cards for the Shugart drives. One the MDS-800s, the Shugart drives uses
>> M2MFM encoding that's not capable with any other system that I know of but
>> the CDC drives use MFM encoding and the "standard" CPM disk format aka IBM
>> 3470 format.
>>
>> Joe
>>
>>
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 14 2002 - 17:51:39 GMT
