Re: Question & Suggestion

["Seth D. Kadesh" <thes+@CMU.EDU>]

mark@trillian.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning) writes:
> 
> No, it isn't stupid.  When I boot my system, I have a 3.5" unidisk, 2
> 5.25" floppy drives, and a 40meg partitioned up into two 20megs (one for
> ProDOS 16 and one for ProDOS 8).  The 5.25" drives simply sit there and
> never poll.  I can put in a diskette, double click on the 5.25" and
> it then reads the disk.  I can then do whatever I want with the disk and,
> when I'm through, I simply close the window and pull out the disk. 

AHA!  You're running a system with a unidisk, not the more
user-friendly Apple 3.5 drive.

(Someone else can explain better - basically the unidisk has a cpu,
but the 3.5 doesn't)

Soenke probably assumed you had a 3.5 drive; the behaviour you
describe is not evident on systems with a 3.5 drive.

> Wouldn't
> it be nice to have the 3.5" drive do the same?  After all, every time the
> 3.5" drive is spun up, there is a chance that the read/write head will
> leave a scratch on the disk, or the 3.5" drive will have a part failure.
> But making the 3.5" drive continuously start/stop, you up the failure
> rate considerably.  Whereas if the 3.5" disk drive simply sat there like
> the 5.25" and didn't attempt to read the disk except when I double-clicked
> on the icon, then my disk drive might just last a little longer.

I'm not sure that the unidisk actually brings the read/write head down
every time it checks, but I never owned one, so I can't be certain....

  Seth ---> thes+@cmu.edu		It is not enough to watch.
"I said 'Forget Topsoil, Think Tinfoil, There's tons of kids who want
to get tanned.'" - Think Tree