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From: peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga disk capacity
Message-ID: <224@graffiti.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Sep-85 09:15:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: graffiti.224
Posted: Sun Sep 22 09:15:41 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 25-Sep-85 10:34:34 EDT
References: <538@oakhill.UUCP> <4349@alice.UUCP>
Organization: The Power Elite, Houston, TX
Lines: 23

> When you multiply 80 tracks time 11 sectors/track time 512 bytes/sec, you
> get 440K all right (formatted.) The Amiga drive is double-sided, and
> NOT flip double-sided. It works, I suspect, like an IBM PC drive,
> alternating tracks on one side then the next (two r/w heads.) Thus the
> drive is 880K.

I hope you can tell it to use 9 secs/track for compatibility with everyone
elses 3.5" formats, which all seem to be 720K.

> The Atari 530ST, on the other hand is something like 360K per side,
> and you must physically flip and notch in holes I suspect to get the
> amount Atari advertises.

You can't flip & punch holes on a 3.5" diskette, friend. It's not physically
possible. Well, I don't know about the 530ST, but I just played with a 520ST
at a computer store, and it had DS 3.5" drives. They also have SS drives, which
may be what's confusing you.

Incidentally Let me give the 520 an A for ambition and a C- for implementation.
It would really have been better to just give it CP/M68K and toss in GEM as an
extra instead of mashing the two together like that. It looks like a toy. It
feels like a toy. And now people who want to do their own windowing stuff and
make at look like a real workstation are out of luck.