Seagate ST-4096 Question

[Steve Nuchia]

>From article <1036 at bellboy.UUCP>, by hack at bellboy.UUCP (Greg Hackney):
> In article <354 at gaia.UUCP> cook at gaia.UUCP writes:
>>Has anybody out there had any expirience making a Seagate ST-4096
 
> Steve Nuchia (steve at nuchat) has one on his AT.

Well, I used to ....

That 4096 is the reason nuchat (my long-suffering 286) was down
all last week.  I don't know whether an incipient electronic
failure was the cause of my seek errors all along or if Microbug's
software (dual disk bug) caused the hardware failure, or if maybe
there were two different problems all along.

Anyway, the 4096 is often involved when people are having the
dual-disk problem, but it isn't the only drive the problem
has been seen on.  I got just over a year of 24-hour multi-neighbor
usenet + 2-line BBS use out of it (head moving pretty much continuously
more often than not) and there is still some hope of it being repaired
for less than the replacement cost.

> However, I did low level it with the Seagate DM formatter (which
> someone just posted a claim that this is a questionable practice).

I missed the claim - using a DOS disk formatter was the only way
to make it work - Microbug's won't even come close.  You may also
need to have a correct entry in your ROMS - they claim to have
fixed the problem, but in a quick trial I wasn't able to make
my system boot from the 4096 with standard roms.  It will work
as a second drive without being in the rom, though.

The 9-headedness isn't too much of a problem if you use a controller
that's prepared for it; I've never had a chance to use anything but
the WD1003-WA2.

Anyone heard anything about support for RLL? SCSI?  How about controllers
that fake 17 sectors (remapping) with RLL?  Failing that, what about
MFM 17-sector drives with >100Mb capacity?  (dream on, I know, but I
just had to ask :-)

	steve
-- 
Steve Nuchia	    | [...] but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy.
uunet!nuchat!steve  | In other words then, if a machine is expected to be
(713) 334 6720	    | infallible, it cannot be intelligent.  - Alan Turing, 1947