cwwj@ur-tut (Clarence Wilkerson) (04/04/88)
I noticed that in the last of isssue of Computer Shopper there were several ads for 8" hard disk that should be suitable for replacing the one in the H67 unit. One ad had a Quantum 2010 for $69. Other prices went up to $300 for a thirty meg model. With minimal reconfiguration, the H67 hardware and software should handle the larger capacity drives also. Or as I mentioned in my original response, one can use the internal sasi bus adapter to talk to a DTC510 or XEBEC 1420 and anybody's 5" st506 drive. These sasi controllers are available for less than a hundred dollars, and there's a lot of 5" winchesters around in the 5-40 megabyte range for $100-400. If you're running CP/M, one small hassle is that the absolute sector number is treated by the bios as a 16 bit unsigned integer, whereas the controller uses a somewhat longer bit pattern to address the drive. What this means is that to get larger drives to work, you need to change the sector size to 1024 bytes/sector so that you can still get to it all with the bios. This is done by a jumper on the controller board. I have a setup on my H89 that I've been running for about 4 years, using the internal H67 card and a DTC510 sasi controller, with a variety of external drives. I never had the 8" drives, so I had to write my own formatting and partitioning software. If anyone still cares about this sort stuff, I'll answer whatever questions you might have. Clarence Wilkerson