Hard Drive Upgrade

[Thad P Floryan]

Peter J Diaz de Leon writes:
"
I have a ATT PC7300 with a 20 meg hard drive.  Can some one please
mail me if it is possible to upgrade the 20 meg to something larger
and if so how to do it.
"


How much HD can you afford?  Putting in, say, a Seagate 40MB ST251-1 (28mS)
drive takes all of 10 minutes from the time one opens the case to the point
of closing the case and powering up.  But I cannot recommend the use of ANY
Seagate drives anymore.

More reasonable is to put a Miniscribe 3085 drive in the 7300; this requires
replacing the WD1010 chip with a WD2010 chip *AND* getting the new diagnostic
disk that permits formatting beyond 1024 cylinders (the 3085 has 7 heads and
1170 cylinders; mine is working fine).  These drives are  ~$590  in CA.

Even better yet is putting a large Maxtor (e.g. XT2190) drive mounted externally
onto one's system; this way you'll get around 145MB; in addition to the WD2010
you'll need the PAL mod to permit more than 8 cylinders (the XT2190 has 15 heads
and 1224 cylinders).

A 20MB drive cripples the UNIXPC.

Some of these HD upgrades require certain skills and "handy-ness" unless you
want to contract a service technician to do the work for you.

If you would explain what you'd LIKE to have on your system, and your level
of hardware expertise, more help will definitely be forthcoming!

BTW, please cross-post to unix-pc.general; not all UNIXPC'ers look at the
newsgroup to which you posted (comp.sys.att).

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]