wilko@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (W.C. Bulte) (02/07/91)
I am looking for information on an Ampex SMD diskdrive type# DFR-996, model# MKM0800C006. This is an SMD drive, with (it seems) 80Mbyte fixed and 16Mbyte removable 14" platters. All info on this drivetype is welcome, and specifically on the driveselect plug. This drive select plug is also the drive number indicator on the frontpanel (for those familiar with DEC drives well known). Of course, this plug is missing... :-( The frontpanel sports a horizontal rectangular slit, with a row of contacts on the upper and lower edge, in which the drive sel plug is placed. We would like to know how to hot-wire these contacts to get this going. (No flames please on obsolete disks, this is used for a no-budget, eh low- budget non-profit organisation. We hope to connect it to our Sun-2 workstations (which we got for free, but without disks)) Help appreciated _ ______________________________________________________________________ | / o / / _ Wilko Bulte Domain: wilko@idca.tds.philips.nl |/|/ / / /( (_) uucp : [mcsun,hp4nl]!philapd!wilko * Philips Information Systems Nederland phone: 055-432372 fax: 055-432103 ____________________________________________________________________________
terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) (02/08/91)
In article <1117@idcapd.idca.tds.philips.nl>, wilko@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (W.C. Bulte) writes: > I am looking for information on an Ampex SMD diskdrive type# DFR-996, > model# MKM0800C006. This is an SMD drive, with (it seems) 80Mbyte fixed and > 16Mbyte removable 14" platters. All info on this drivetype is welcome, and > specifically on the driveselect plug. This drive select plug is also the > drive number indicator on the frontpanel (for those familiar with DEC drives > well known). Of course, this plug is missing... :-( The frontpanel sports > a horizontal rectangular slit, with a row of contacts on the upper and lower > edge, in which the drive sel plug is placed. We would like to know how > to hot-wire these contacts to get this going. I don't know if this helps you, but it sounds like a clone of the CDC Phoenix disk drive. The cartridge looks sort of like a 2315 cartridge (which sort of looks like the hull of the old Starship Enterprise 8-) and is usually a deep blue color. Does this sound correct? I have CDC and DEC unit select plugs, so if you tell me which number you need and whether you want CDC sequence or DEC sequence, I'll send you one. Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing terry@spcvxa.bitnet St. Peter's College, US terry@spcvxa.spc.edu (201) 915-9381
jje@virtech.uucp (Jeremy J. Epstein) (02/09/91)
In article <1117@idcapd.idca.tds.philips.nl>, wilko@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (W.C. Bulte) writes: > I am looking for information on an Ampex SMD diskdrive type# DFR-996, > model# MKM0800C006. This is an SMD drive, with (it seems) 80Mbyte fixed and > 16Mbyte removable 14" platters. This sounds like a unit we used at Perkin-Elmer. It was sold in three configurations: 13/13, 13/39, and 13/67 MB (removable/fixed). [13MB is the formatted capacity; 16MB unformatted.] As is so often the case, they were almost identical inside. There were always three platters in the fixed portion, but with 1, 3, or 5 read/write heads (the sixth side was for timing). Upgrading consisted of getting additional heads installed. And now for a bit of folklore. The fixed heads were addressed as 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. From the SMD standpoint, it was one drive (not two), and the removable unit used head 16 (0x10). If you screwed it up (as many disk drivers did) and tried to treat the removable drive separately from the fixed drive, you ended up scribbling on the hard drive. This made for a very hard problem to fix...everything would be normal, and then suddenly your file systems were horribly corrupted. I fixed this bug in the disk driver once, only to have someone break it again in the next release... These drives are also about the slowest I've ever seen to spin up... it seemed to take minutes! -- Jeremy Epstein TRW Systems Division 703-876-8776 jje%virtech@uunet.uu.net