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Re: To bang or not to bang

Tristan Mumford wrote:

Hello everybody.

I have a little dilemma.

I wish to back up my collection of 5.25" disks, and also access them for
other reasons on my IIgs.
Up until now I have been using one of the Apple 5.25" drives from my //e. I
swear all the headbanging is killing it. But it transfers things so quickly
in IIgs mode.


There's no real stress on the drive from attempting to seek out past
track 0.  The head motion cam hits a stop, and then the stepper motor
stops stepping--but this does not cause any wear on the cam or the stop,
and there is no extra acceleration of the head compared to normal
stepping.

It just makes noise.  Don't worry about it.  ;-)


My other option is to use an Atlas-8 drive I have. What sets it aside from
the Apple 5.25 is it has headbang protection. Ie no rattle-rattle. However
using this I would need to drop a floppy controller card into my IIgs,
which would mean a drop to 1MHz during transfers. (Or does the IIgs do that
anyway with smartport devices?).


For any GCR 5.25" drive it *must* slow to 1MHz.


Sure there's the third option of making an adaptor to put the Atlas-8 on the
end of the daisychain, but I still don't feel confident enough about the
pinout, and don't feel like mutilating a connector down to the right size
if I can avoid it.

What would the best option be, in peoples opinion?


No action.

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."