Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site spuxll.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!floyd!whuxle!spuxll!pjm From: pjm@spuxll.UUCP (PJ Maioriello) Newsgroups: net.micro.cbm Subject: Re: MSD disk drive review Message-ID: <491@spuxll.UUCP> Date: Fri, 8-Jun-84 09:29:43 EDT Article-I.D.: spuxll.491 Posted: Fri Jun 8 09:29:43 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 9-Jun-84 07:47:20 EDT References: <484@spuxll.UUCP>, <372@charm.UUCP> Organization: AT&T Information Systems, South Plainfield NJ Lines: 79 OK OK Sorry I forgot to post the price in my MSD drive review. To answer that question: The best price I have seen so far is from RK Enterprises (mail order 1-800-821-1545). The SD-1 (single drive) is $359, SD-2 (dual drive) is $599. NOTE: I don't know anything about RK (I brought mine to help out a friend who ordered 2 SD-2s before he came back to reality) except that they have the lowest price I have seen so far. I also have heard the CRAZY EDDIE's (in NJ/NY area) will sell the SD-1. Old CRAZ says he'll beat any price any time. To answer Ray MIller's question about head alignment: First of all my MSD is less than a month old so I can't speak from experience. My 1541 is well over a year old and it seems to go through periods of times where it operates flawlessly and then every once in a while I will notice it perfoming a lot of retries (the read LED blinks and sometimes the drive clanks). I can always read my oldedt disks perfectly. My interpretation of this is that the heads on the 1541 are no longer perfectly aligned, and are over time becoming increasingly mis-aligned. I have heard and am fairly convinced that the reason the 1541 suffers from this problem is that in order to save money CBM did not equip the drive to detect it's outermost track in any fancy way. Most drives, apparently (I am not an expert here) use some tome of photo cell or switch to detect the otermost drive when they do certain operations (like initializations, error retries, fomatting, etc). The 1541 detects this track by banging the head against a physical stop. This is the famous "clanking" that is heard when a disk is formatted or when you get an error. You can imaginw that a moving head being stopped by a physical obstruction is probably not conducive to maintaining head alignment. When you consider how much commercial software is "protected" by error encoding, it is often a wonder that the heads stay in alignment as ling as they do. How many "the noise you hear dring loading is normal" messages have you seen. In constrast (according to the MSD service people) the MSDs are equipped with some type of centrifugal switch that detects the outer track. I know from experience that the MSD does not clank. I now try to use it exclusively to format disks (beside the fact that it does it much faster) and to load commercial software that I haven't gotten around to figure out how to eliminate the stupid error checks yet. I fully expect this to provide my 1541 with a much longer useful operating life. If any body else out there has had an MSD for a longer period of time or can agree with or refute the above I would be interested in hearing from them. In summary I dont think that the MSD are going to have any more head alignment problems that other typical drives that use a decent method for detecting where the head is. Incidentally, I have heard that CBM has finally realized this and the 1542 drives will not use the bang the head method like the 1541 does. Whew, one more thing, the followup to this article, I dont have an IEEE interface (yet). I cant directly comment on how they work or how compatible they are. I don't THINK however that they will present any problem because that is what all the other CBM computers (not 64 and VIC 20) use. In fact, the serial bus was adopted only as a cost cutting measure (what else?) with the introduction of the VIC 20. Prior to that CBM had always used the IEEE standard. That's why I dont think that there will be any big problems. Also I tried running a CPM system generated to run on a 44k C64 IEEE system using my MSD drive on the SERIAL bus and it worked!! It seems as if the kernal routines don't really care all that much wether you are hanging off an IEEE bus or the built in serial bus. Perhaps Ray can verify this. A friend has just gotten a Batteries Included IEEE bus card that has some very interesting features. When I learn more I will post another articles. My typing fingers are getting awfully tired. Paul Maioriello AT&T ISL spuxll!pjm