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