Re: Flopticals/backup systems

[toddpw@cco.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

Ryan Collins <RC1DSANU@MIAMIU.BITNET> writes:

>What about special formats, like formatting a MFM disk with 10 sectors a track
>at 80 tracks? This yields a 800k disk. (Although still not a HFS disk, it
>does allow a little more storage, and by doing this you can store almost
>1.76 megs on a 1.44 disk. I format 828K disks all the time on my ST, with 10
>sectors a track at 82 tracks.)

That's a nonstandard format, which is probably ST specific. One wonders how
reliable it is to cram an extra sector on every track. On the floptical you
can just buy 21mb disks for $25 a pop and not worry about squeezing HD disks
for every last drop (and to me the interchangeability of the HD format is the
main reason I chose the floptical over other removable SCSI drives).

The floptical will let you format different sector sizes, and you can get 800k
type disks if you format it with 1k sectors, however the RamFast probably won't
support it (it's too attached to 0.5k sectors to keep things reasonably simple)
nor will the DMA SCSI unless somebody does a driver to support it. Let's just
say I am skeptical that this will happen...

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ cco.caltech.edu