weaver@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Andrew Weaver) (01/12/88)
A few weeks (months?) back I posted some of my triumphs and tribulations of creating a hard drive for my 520ST, and I thought some of you doing the same might like to hear about it. (If not, hit 'n'.) The IMI drives from the Corvus Systems' network boxes DID work with the drives. They behave similarly to the standard st506 drive, but these wierdos have 6 heads and format to about 15Mb apiece. Fortunately a friend provided me with a MiniScribe mechanism that formats to about 21Mb, which was nicer. But, I got greedy and wanted to hook up my Miniscribe and one of the two IMIs. Well, after getting a three-way cable from another friend, I attempted to hook the two together. Well, to those that have IMI drives, don't try to hook them to a Miniscribe on the same BMS controller board. It will work OK for awhile, but event- ually trash the filesystem on the Miniscribe. I think that somewheres these boys are electrically incompatible, or perhaps I had a bad three-way cable. In any event I went with a simple one-drive system. Since I have had no problems. I took the drive home with me during winter break, forgot to park the heads (dummy) and didn't even have the drive bolted down inside the box, and the things still somehow survived. Call it karma, or whatever, but now its bolted down. Thinking about buying a BMS? DO IT. If you can cough up the $250 for the boards, can find a cheap drive mechanism and a power supply (and a fan and box, but not to get up and running) go for it. Spending $500-$700 on a turnkey from Atari, ICD or Supra isn't worth it if you are willing to take a few chances... and save about half. I just read the article about the Atari laser being available retail at last--$1600 without on-board memory, fonts or CPU? Give it up. You can get an Okidata for ~$1300... or better deals on PS printers (non-Apple), while not at $1600, but with PS fonts and a CPU. Atari better get real or they can forget it... really. I like Atari and all, I will keep my ST, but my next computer will be from Apple. Sit down and use a Mac II folks... you'll see a real computer. Nothing short of a Sun 3/50 compares. You can argue "Multi-tasking" until Warner buys back Atari and nothing will happen; for me, its Macs and UNIX in the future. Not GEM, GemDog, AmigaDog or Intuition. Off the soapbox... --- Andrew Weaver, OSU College of Business weaver@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu I've met someone who looks a lot like you She does the things you do But she is an IBM. -- ELO, "Yours truly, 2095" -- Andrew Weaver, OSU College of Business weaver@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu I've met someone who looks a lot like you She does the things you do But she is an IBM. -- ELO, "Yours truly, 2095"