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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
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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