🚀 go-pugleaf

With all the talk of hard-disks on the net, I figured it was time to
check-out putting together my own hard-disk.  I wanted to do it cheaply, and
also wanted a little adventure in doing it.

I borrowed a Tandon TM755 disk-drive from work.  It is actually a very
expensive drive, but my experience would not have changed if I used a cheaper
one.  This drive has 50 MB unformatted capacity, and 28 millisec average
seek time (one hellava-lot better than a Seagate drive).  I bought a
150 watt PC-AT power supply from a mail-order company for $79.  I later
found one for only $50.  Next, I contacted Berkley Microsystems.  They were
very helpful and within a week after they recieved my check I received their
boards.  Using some screws and other hardware I "found",  I bolted the
two board, the BMS-100, and the Adaptek-4000 together.  I placed a small
peice of plywood on the top of the bolts and rested the disk on top of it.

The menu-driven software from BMS is very easy to use, and I was formating
the disk within minutes of powering-up the drive.

The added benefit of this system is that the BMS board contains a 
battery backed-up clock, which so far seem to work great with software
provided by BMS.  

Needless to say, I am very pleased with this system.  I run the Beckmeyer
MT-Cshell version 1.10 and it is very happy to be running from the hard-disk.

As an aside, I originally boughtt MT-Cshell version 1.00.  This the new
version includes bug fixes for some most of the programs that had difficulty
running under 1.0.  This fix thankfully included a fix to a bug that caused
an application I wrote not to work.  Also, the update cost me $10.00 and took
only 1.5 weeks to be delivered. 


I use the Megamax compiler ver 1.0.  I am going to send for an update
to version 1.1 (I think).  I'll post a message about the fixes,
improvements etc.


AS always the views and oppinions expressed by me are my own, and
only represent my neurons and not  AT&T's or anyone else's who might
yell at me.


Wesley Kaplow
AT&T
Holmdel, NJ 07733
(201)949-0065