Re: vintage hard drive scalpers on ebay

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Article #324

#324

From: Bruce Esquibel
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:18

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Cydrome Leader <presence@mungepanix.com> wrote:

> Its odd people haven't migrated that legacy shit over to some flash drive 
> with an SCSI connector on it yet.

I'd guess they can't.

The interface wouldn't be the problem is much as the controller, which is
probably embedded.

Remember back then, most models of hard drives were available for years, so
the controller likely had a hard-coded parameter list for the drive. Back
then when you formatted a drive, you usually had to stick in the # of
platters, heads, even rotation speed.

All that and it's probably an 8-bit or 16-bit firmware, limiting the max
numbers to deal with well below even a "small" drive these days would have
for cylinder and sector counts.

I suppose something real small, like a GB or two might work but I'd bet
anything they have something in the controller firmware so it only worked
with one or two particular drives specifically, mostly to make sure you went
back to the company for an expensive replacement.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com

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From: Bruce Esquibel <bje@ripco.com>
Newsgroups: chi.internet
Subject: Re: vintage hard drive scalpers on ebay
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:18:06 +0000 (UTC)
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