timlee@bnrmtv.UUCP (Timothy Lee) (08/12/86)
> >An Apple ][ with software disk control will beat a > > Radio Shack model II (w/controller) hands down in disk performance. > > My brother recently purchased a //c ( which is why I am reading this grp ) and > I am impressed at the speed of the disk. But I imagine your comparison is > more of a reflection on the Radio Shack... > > [Epson QX-10 stuff] > > > > > * Faster track to track seek time. > > * Higher density. > > * Fast transfer times. > > Yes, and the latter two are impressive, given the software support required. Density was quite high during the days when the disk drive and DOS were new (1979-1982). Not any more, now that better drives have come out on the market. Speed is still good if you have one of the Fast DOS products or ProDOS. > > > >Also you can operate the disk spinning backward, or lay down spiral sectors. > > Can you operate the disk spinning backwards? Do Tell. > As for spiral sectors, the inability of hardware to do such nasties protects > users from horrible copy-protection schemes. This applies to half-tracking, > as well. > RWTS (the part of DOS which reads and writes individual sectors) supports half tracking; however, the rest of DOS does not. Apple drives do not seek finely enough to be able to use adjacent half tracks without interference. 70-track drives have come out which claim to be able to do this, but you would have to do some DOS hacking to use all 70 tracks (don't know about ProDOS).