Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!xanth!tadguy
From: tadguy@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Tad Guy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Semicoherent flame about Amigados. (Really: disk drives)
Message-ID: <4108@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 88 21:07:00 GMT
References: <2539@crash.cts.com> <5249@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: tadguy@xanth.UUCP (Tad Guy)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 35
Keywords: toshiba
Summary: some drive's leds don't always reflect motor on

In article <5249@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes:
>In article <2539@crash.cts.com> haitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) writes:
>>A simple solution would be to leave the LED on until no more 
>>jobs are queued for the drive.
>>
>This is the case with the 1000.  The LEDs reflect the true status of
>drive activity.  However, when it came time to create the 2000, something
>got lost in the translation.
>
>	Evidently, some engineer at Braunschweig couldn't figure out what
>this flip-flop was for, decided it served no useful purpose, and diked it
>out of the 2000 design.

[ ...and thereby saving Commodore millions in production costs... :-( ]

Or it may be the drive manufacturer...

I have a pair of Toshiba FDS-362's connected to my A1000.  The LED on
these drives is gated by read/write activity, not by motor activity.
The result is that even though the motor is running, the light on the
drive only lights when io is actually occuring to/from the disk.  If I
use a NEC drive in place of one of the Toshibas the LED works as
expected.

I added a second LED to the drive to follow the state of the real LED
line, and kept the other LED as it is.  It's sorta neat to see when
the disk io is really occuring compared to when the motor is just
runing.

	...tad

Tad Guy         (804)-440-4529              UUCP:  tadguy@xanth.UUCP
Department of Computer Science                or:  ...!uunet!xanth!tadguy
Old Dominion University                 new ARPA:  tadguy@cs.odu.edu
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