Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!hao!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!UHHEPG.BITNET!RALPH From: RALPH@UHHEPG.BITNET Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm Subject: Re: 8" floppy drive problems Message-ID: <8803211515.AA00645@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 20 Mar 88 23:05:00 GMT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 37 Date: 20-MAR-1988 14:54:43.46 From: Ralph Becker-Szendy RALPH AT UHHEPG To: 0::"info-cpm@simtel20.arpa",RALPH Subj: Re: 8" floppy drive problems *** FLAME ON *** tetra!budden@nosc.mil (Ray A. Buddenberg) writes: > But there is one additional reason that 8" can be a liability > in certain situations. The drive motor is the only thing in > the whole computer that does anything with 60 Hz. Aboard ships ... If you ever want to move your computer to a place which has 50Hz power (like Europe), make sure you get 8" drives where the belt-driving wheel on the spindle motor has two seperate "tracks"; than you can take the wheel off and just reverse it to change 50 <-> 60 Hz. The funny part is, not even all Siemens drives (built in Mexico for the US and German market) have these reversible wheels. Jeff Wieland writes: > I've always heard that 8" was MORE reliable. True. Single-side single-density 8" floppies are nearly indestructible. Usually, if a floppy fails, you can actually see a hole in the magnet layer, and sometimes even a hole in the disk ! Even scratches and fingerprints on the recording surface are sometimes survived. I think there is a much more important advantage of 8" drives: you can always buy and interchange software on "eight inch, SSSD, IBM format"; it is sometimes (usually ?) hard to interchange information on the myriads of 5" formats. The biggest disadvantage of 8" disk drives (according to my bad taste) is their noise level; in particular if you don't outfit them with a motor-off circuit; my computer sounds like a starting jet in mty office. *** FLAME OFF *** Sorry for such a long message with so little information. Ralph Becker-Szendy RALPH@UHHEPG.BITNET University of Hawaii / High Energy Physics Group (808)948-7391 Watanabe Hall #203, 2505 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI 96822 "Hawaii - it's not just for tourists. People actually live and work there."