🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <90011904272373@masnet.uucp> jf.messier@canremote.uucp (JF MESSIER) writes:

>  From: jf.messier@canremote.uucp (JF MESSIER)
>  Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
>  Date: 15 Jan 90 07:45:00 GMT
>  Organization: Canada Remote Systems Limited, Mississauga, ON, Canada
>
>  >>       Is it possible to use a MFM hard disk drive with an RLL
>  >>       controller? Are there particular MFM drives that will do it?
>  >>       How would I tell?
>  >The basic problem is that the coating on the disk is not designed to
>  >handle the density of data used by the RLL format, and it WILL
>  >'forget' what you have stored there.
>
>      I had a really bad experience with such controllers. At Revenue 
>  Canada, we have a lot of Epson Equiti I+, each with a 30M hard disk 
>  (in fact, a 20M and a RLL controller). BUT, the drives used were 
>  Miniscribe, NOT APPROVED for RLL, so MFM-ONLY. We had problems, mainly 
>  new bad sectors appearing and destroying information. ...

I recently bought a FlashCard-30 from CompuAdd, built from an RLL
controller and a MiniScribe 8438.  The disk would format properly, but
a couple of days after being formatted it would start failing the
PC-TOOLS verify test (new bad sectors, and eventually hard seek
errors).  I'll be calling CompuAdd this week, but my problem certainly
seems to be explained by the article above.  Does anyone know if
in fact the MiniScribes are *NOT* reliable RLL drives, in general?
I've heard of other FlashCard 30s that have worked out fine...

						Moises

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