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From: phil@wubios.wustl.edu (J. Philip Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Single sided diskettes
Message-ID: <502@wubios.wustl.edu>
Date: 23 Jun 89 02:03:16 GMT
References: <2214@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <111700109@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: phil@wubios.UUCP (J. Philip Miller)
Organization: Washington University (St. Louis)
Lines: 29

In article <111700109@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> sasg0244@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>/* Written  6:31 pm  Jun 19, 1989 by tcm@srhqla.UUCP in uxa.cso.uiuc.edu:comp.sys.ibm.pc */
>>In article <2214@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
>(Cliff Joslyn) writes:
>>>Is it kosher to use 5.25" SS/DD disks formatted at 360K . . .
>Well, this may have changed since I last looked into it, but as of a
>couple of years ago the only difference between SS and DS disks was
>that the manufacturers actually tested the second side of the DS
>disks. They had no idea if there were any defects on the second side
>of the SS disks. I've always bought SS disks and used them as DS disks
>and I've never had a problem. But hell, I could be wrong.
>
well what is stranger is the question of which side they were testing.  I
always used to marvel at this in the early micro days since the majority of
single sided drives were either on low end Apples or low end PC's.  Of course,
given the lawas of engineering, each used a DIFFERENT side of the disk!  No
disk vendor that I am aware of (apart from IBM & Apple of course) ever labeled
their single sided disks as for IBM or apple.

My assumption was essentially that it was more a matter of insurance than a
matter of strict quality control, e.g. they would't replace the SS disk if it
failed at double sided but worked at SS.

-phil
-- 
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J. Philip Miller - Div of Biostat - Washington Univ Medical School
phil@wubios.WUstl.edu - Internet        phil@wubios.wustl - bitnet
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