[Coco] CoCo Hard Drive History

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 12 October 2013 21:57:48 Bruce W. Calkins did opine:

> I seem to recall the Burke and Burke interface needed the ??-1004 MFM
> controller.
> Bruce W.

I've had 2 of them, still have 1.  The first was a disaster, used a 
WD-1002-27 and an ST238 30 meg RLL drive.  About 2% of the time when 
reading the fat, it would return a whole sector of $00 from a sector of the 
fat that was in fact well occupied. I spent more time trying to salvage a 
screwed up file system that had 250 sectors in the map but not allocated, 
and vice versa, with a lot of my early work simply destroyed.  Eventually 
replaced with a Disto 4n1 & a Maxtor 7120S drive, which never dropped a 
bit.  Now there is a TC^3 controller and a pair of 1Gb Seagate Hawk drives 
on my main coco3, all sitting on the workstation desk mentioned below.

Then later, about 1991, I bought another for my office & development 
machine at the tv station but setup for a pair of MFM drives, and while it 
was last fired up by me in 2002, it had yet to lose a single bit on a 20 
meg and 10 meg pair of tandon 5.25" drives.  After I retired, Dave wanted 
to use a PC, so he gave me the whole setup, desk and all.  I did fire it up 
one time, had to give the drives a bump to start them after 5 years 
sitting, but worked ok, both drives passing a dcheck.  But no room to leave 
it setup, and the CM8 let the magic smoke out shortly after anyway, so ATM 
I'd have to rig a gaming machine vga convertor to it for video.

The early one, the black sandwich of alu with the two cards in it, was the 
disaster model,  the newer one, stamped & formed cad plated alu, has worked 
well.  But the MFM was slow, nearly a minute for a megaread, whereas the 
4n1 could do a megaread in 13 secs flat.
 
> ===================
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "goosey"
> 
> > Since I know the 1010 and 2010 are MFM controllers I assume the
> > Eliminator's 1002 is also MFM.
> > 
> > Willard
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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