Re: ramfasts and flopticals?

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

"Seth D. Kadesh" <sk2f+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

>ok guys.  what's the deal?  i've got a ramfast with the new roms, and
>a clone pc.  i remember the discussion about the 20 meg floptical
>drives that can read ibm disks - i'd like to add storage to my gs, and
>the added convenience of easy data transfer would be nice.  so what
>kind (manufacturer) of drive is it?  what are the exact capabilities
>(high density, low density, mac disks also)?

It would have been nice if you'd saved out those messages -- I repeated all
the stuff you are asking about _multiple_ times. In brief:

Mechanism is Insite I325VM from Insite Peripherals Inc. It is a SCSI device,
Insite claims it supports the Common Command Set. Comments made by CVT indicate
that this is mostly true.

Current vendors in Apple II market are Tulin Technology and AE. The AE drive
is cheaper, but my experience with Tulin has been that they are quite good
about support.

Drive handles three formats: 20 meg (proprietary but licensed to many partners)
which has the same form factor as a standard 3.5 but is a special disk that
costs $25; 1.44meg "HD" 3.5 floppies in MFM format, also used by IBM 1.4 drives
and Apple/Mac FDHD; 720K 3.5 floppies, used by IBM 720K drive but NOT supported
by Apple 3.5 drives.

Reading of Mac/IBM formats is dependent on FST's, i.e. Mac disks can be used
now, but MSDOS is not usable yet.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ cco.caltech.edu