[Coco] coco fix for tempermental disk drives

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

People,
    I have discovered something which applies to  all
disk drives with the flat ribbon cable connection in the
back.   Back in the day about 25 years ago I used my
old gray drives extensively on a program I was developing at 
the time.  It really made heavy use of the drives where  compilations
took as much a 30 minutes to complete.    I was frustrated  with the
number of errors I was getting.   They seemed to be random  and
unpredictable.    
 
   Fast forward to today and I set the same system up in a  mobile
rack so I can show it off to visitors.   I was going to relegate  it to
being just a conversation piece because I thought the drives were
unreliable for some reason.    I thought maybe they were out  of
alignment or just worn out.    Well, while setting the  system up,
I made a custom cable from scratch that would enable all 4 drives
possible with the coco1 I was using.   I also cleaned all  connectors
on the back of each drive with acetone.
 
   Well I bet you can guess what happened.   Those 4  drives have been
under heavy use for the past few weeks and have not dropped a single
byte in error.    I have written software that completely  scans each drive 
in succession
one after the other, sector after sector and have let it run all day and  
not
a single error recorded.
 
    My recommendation to everyone is first "refresh" the  hold each of the
connectors has on your ribbon cable by putting them into a small  vise
and compressing it.  Then take some acetone from the hardware  store
and clean the back connectors.   My old gray drives that were  only
designed to last 5 years are still going strong today thanks to a  little
TLC.   
 
Roy