Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!nrl-cmf!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!braner
From: braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (braner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: alternative hard drives
Summary: cheap fix for (?) my SH204
Keywords: hard disk, used, cheap
Message-ID: <5602@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 21 Jul 88 15:18:48 GMT
References: <4229@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <1623@usl-pc.UUCP>
Reply-To: braner@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (braner)
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 31

[]

I finally got a cheap fix for my SH204 (the drive mech died after 7 months
of service).  Went to one of the larger local PC shops and got a used,
traded in, drive for $50 (as-is, no warranty, although they were willing
to check it out and format it for me for another $50, which I declined).
It happened to be a Seagate ST238.  You might wonder how can that
30 meg RLL drive work on the SH204's MFM controller.  Well, they told
me that an ST238 is really just an ST225 (20 megs MFM) tested to tighter
specs, and should work fine on my controller even though it was a bit
flaky in its former life as an RLL drive.

Replacing the drive mech in the SH204 was easy, you only need a small
Phillips screwdriver and a small wrench or pair of pliers for the nuts that
hold the controller card.  Make sure you plug in the cables the same way
(relative to the slots in the edge connectors) that they were plugged
into the old drive: the Atari cables do NOT make use of the polarity
key slots on the drives edge connectors, so it IS possible to plug them
in backwards, probably smoking something.

Turned out that the original drive (a Tandon TM262) was a 3.5" drive
inside of additional hardware to make it fit where a 5.25" drive would.
The ST238 takes longer to spin up and is a bit noisier, but... when
I get rich I'll get a (logically) large, fast, quiet 3.5" SCSI drive.

The Supra formatting program didn't complain, and found no bad sectors.
If I knew it's that easy to get a cheap drive, I would've gone home-brew
from the start.  The BMS boards + large case + PS + fan + clock + cables
+ instructions + SW, all for $325 --- great deal!

- Moshe Braner