stan@rice.ARPA (05/13/84)
From: Stan Hanks <stan@rice.ARPA> As I was in the market for some DSDD 8" drives, I bought a pair of Siemens FD200 drives from JDR Microdevices, and persuaded a friend of mine to do the same. We got the beasties in late January, but due to the usual academic pressures, didn't have a chance to play with them until this week (making them long out of warranty). My friend runs MS-DOS on a Seatlle 8086 S100 board set; I run CP/M 2.2 on a highly modified Heath H89. We both have problems getting the disks to perform in a sane fashion. As nearly as I can tell from the manual, they are correctly strapped. The symptoms are that every so often the drives do not correctly recognize various sectors for either reading or writing. If this were more persistent, I would be tempted to so that one head or another was not correctly functioning; however, they do work after a fashion and that would seem to indicate something more intermittent. A friend thought that he recalled an article or letter in one of the popular magazines (Byte?) that claimed disfunctionality with the FD200 drives, and proposed a fix for this. Does anyone either have this information, or have any additional information thatt might be of help? Any info is appreciated; assuming that none is forthcoming, anyone want to buy 4 8" floppy sized paperweights????? Stan Hanks Department of Computer Science Rice University Houston TX stan@rice.ARPA (arpanet) stan@rice (csnet) ...!lbl-csam!rice!stan (uucp)
burton@fortune.UUCP (05/23/84)
#R:sri-arpa:-69700:fortune:25500012:000:319 fortune!burton May 23 11:25:00 1984 Siemens has exited the floppy disk drive business. You might have bought, and I say **might** to avoid getting sued, drives built with parts such as heads or read/write circuit parts, that were not up to snuff. Good luck. check out old Shugart drives, but don't buy "tri-compliants". Qumes are probably the best.