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From: c60c-1gd@e260-3c.berkeley.edu (Joon Song)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: MFM -- RLL drive
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.193630.19992@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 25 Sep 90 19:36:30 GMT
References: <2a81P1w162w@zooid.UUCP>
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In article <2a81P1w162w@zooid.UUCP> dve@zooid.UUCP (David Mason) writes:
>I have a 70 mb 28ms full height Micropolis 1330 (I think, or 1335) hard 
>disk. It currently has an MFM controller. I was told by a couple of 
>individuals that it would be safe to RLL this drive (to about 110mb, I 
>think), and a couple of other people told me this drive could NOT be safely 
>RLL'd. I'd like to know the "real" answer. I called what support Micropolis 
>had here in Canada (not much) and only recieved a very vague answer. So can 
>someone give me an authoritative answer? The drive has no errors on it at 
>all (I've checked it with a couple of programs) and is about 2 years old 
>(possibly older, I bought it used). The drive is constantly full, and I 
>could really use the extra 30 megs.

The "real" answer depends on who you talk to.  There are those who have had
problem with RLL drives in the past, and there are those who have not. 
I am among those that have not had any problems with RLL drives.  I own
a Seagate 238R, a 30meg RLL drive which has been running perfectly for the
last 3 three years on a PC.  I also have a Seagate 4096 formatted with an RLL 
controller.  The 4096 is an 80meg MFM drive.  With the RLL controller, it's
capacity is 122megs.  You also get higher throughput using an RLL controller.
A 1:1 MFM controller will provide about 470KB/sec compared to 660KB+/sec for
a 1:1 RLL controller.