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From: keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Right Story, Wrong Conclusion (was Re: MFM as an RLL drive?)
Message-ID: <6726@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 90 22:27:55 GMT
References: <90011904272373@masnet.uucp>
Reply-To: keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 30

In article <90011904272373@masnet.uucp> jf.messier@canremote.uucp (JF MESSIER) writes:
]>>       Is it possible to use a MFM hard disk drive with an RLL
]>>       controller?

]>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.
 ^^^^^^^^^^
]...
]When Epson came to change the HD, they brought ST-236, 
                                                ^^^^^^
]which are RLL-approved, but they had to try 16 of these to find 5 that 
]worked in the computers. They had to come 4 times and they wasted a lot
]of time in testing those drives. Even after all drives were installed, 
]we had other bad sectors appearing on the disks....
]
]          STAY AWAY FROM RLL, PLEASE......... !!!!

This should be:

	Stay away from Miniscribe.

		Stay away from Seagate.

kEITHe