Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!brunix!doorknob!mlm From: mlm@cs.brown.edu (Moises Lejter) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: MFM as an RLL drive? Message-ID: Date: 21 Jan 90 16:53:53 GMT References: <90011904272373@masnet.uucp> Sender: news@brunix.UUCP Reply-To: mlm@cs.brown.edu Distribution: na Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science Lines: 35 In-reply-to: jf.messier@canremote.uucp's message of 15 Jan 90 07:45:00 GMT In article <90011904272373@masnet.uucp> jf.messier@canremote.uucp (JF MESSIER) writes: > From: jf.messier@canremote.uucp (JF MESSIER) > Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc > Date: 15 Jan 90 07:45:00 GMT > Organization: Canada Remote Systems Limited, Mississauga, ON, Canada > > >> Is it possible to use a MFM hard disk drive with an RLL > >> controller? Are there particular MFM drives that will do it? > >> How would I tell? > >The basic problem is that the coating on the disk is not designed to > >handle the density of data used by the RLL format, and it WILL > >'forget' what you have stored there. > > I had a really bad experience with such controllers. At Revenue > Canada, we have a lot of Epson Equiti I+, each with a 30M hard disk > (in fact, a 20M and a RLL controller). BUT, the drives used were > Miniscribe, NOT APPROVED for RLL, so MFM-ONLY. We had problems, mainly > new bad sectors appearing and destroying information. ... I recently bought a FlashCard-30 from CompuAdd, built from an RLL controller and a MiniScribe 8438. The disk would format properly, but a couple of days after being formatted it would start failing the PC-TOOLS verify test (new bad sectors, and eventually hard seek errors). I'll be calling CompuAdd this week, but my problem certainly seems to be explained by the article above. Does anyone know if in fact the MiniScribes are *NOT* reliable RLL drives, in general? I've heard of other FlashCard 30s that have worked out fine... Moises ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet/CSnet: mlm@cs.brown.edu BITNET: mlm@browncs.BITNET UUCP: ...!uunet!brunix!mlm Phone: (401)863-7664 USmail: Moises Lejter, Box 1910 Brown University, Providence RI 02912