wh@houxz.UUCP (W.HEINMILLER) (12/21/83)
A couple of weeks ago I requested information about Apple compatible disk drives. I have received several responses by mail, and found a good article about Apple compatible drives in the September 1982 issue of Softalk ("Hardtalk", by Jeffrey Mazur, pages 208-211). I'm posting a summary of what I have learned because someone else out there might also find it useful. This table shows the products I received comments on, and the number of favorable and unfavorable comments about each product. Positive Negative Product Comments Comments Rana drive 2 0 Rana controller card 3 0 Micro-Sci drives 1 1 Trak drives 1 1 Lobo drives 1 0 Lobo controller card 1 0 Call A.P.P.L.E. drives 1 0 From the article and comments I have learned the following: 1. To be safe, your first drive should be a standard Apple Disk II. This is the only way you can be sure to run any software, regardless of the strange protection schemes. 2. There are drives with faster and more precise head positioning mechanisms than Apple's drive. However, DOS must be patched to use the faster seek rates. Without the patches, the disks use the seek rate for the Apple disks. 3. Any drive which offers more storage than the Apple disk (143K) requires patches to DOS. Without the patchs, the disk MAY run as a standard disk without access to the additional storage. (Useful if you need to generate a standard 143K disk copy.) 4. Current Apple compatible disks may not be fully compatible with the new soon-to-be released operating system. Given what I have learned, I plan to get a Rana Elite Two for our system. We already have a standard Apple drive as drive 1. We need the greater storage capacity for some of our work, and given the cooperation between Rana and Apple recently to produce the MS-DOS box, I expect the Rana equipment stands a good chance of remaining compatible with future operating systems. Thanks to everyone for your assistance. Wayne Heinmiller AT&T Bell Laboratories houxz!wh Freehold NJ