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Seagate ST-238R
This 5.25" half-height disc drive can be recognized in a system without
opening it's case. It makes a weird noise when the This is one of my favorite disc drives so that's why I spent so many lines of writing to describe it - I guess that the picture says more about the visual aspects of the disc drive. I do like the way Seagate has built this drive. It has a good shape but looks a little bit "rough" and the LED lights way too much. I think it is from the last models of RLL disc drives made because mine is dated way back in 1990. At the time there were fast and large (50Mb and up) SCSI disc drives and there were systems sold with fast and large IDE drives. I still use this disc drive from time to time. I have noticed that the controller keeps the drive's parameters so I keep using it on my 386 system as well as on my 486 and AMD K6-II/500MHz. I haven't been able to connect an IDE drive along with the RLL drive (maybe because I don't know how to see the memory range of the IDE host adapter on the 386/486 computer...) but a SCSI disc drive may coexist with this RLL disc drive. And that's due to SCSI being a host adapter, not really a disc drive controller. I recommend all of you interested in old disc drives to spend some time with this ageing disc drive (it may not be the best RLL drive but still a reliable one), and that if you haven't yet -- try not to get angry, disc drive's speed is lower than you'd want and the noise is infernal. CHARACTERISTICS: CAPACITY:
32,7Mb |
motor starts and stops. Once you hear that noise, you will not forget
it for your entire life. It is a RLL disc drive (my version was bought
in 2003 from a bazaar at a price of about 1$). I also bought a Western
Digital WD1004-27X for 1,5$ and when I got home I mounted the whole
disc drive system on a 286. After running the DEBUG program (I used
it to launch the embedded BIOS at address C:500), I used FDISK then
issued a FORMAT C: /U command, I had a clean RLL disc drive with only
13 bad sectors. Luckily enough, those bad sectors were in range "first
1Mb-first 5Mb of the disc" so I filled that portion with a dump file.
After that, I installed DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1, a perfect pair. I found
the disc drive a little bit slower than I'd want so I tried it on an
AMD K6-II/500MHz equipped with a Soyo motherboard (I thought that the
8-bit ISA bus on the 286 was working at something less than 8MHz but
I guess it wasn't...). The drive refused to work until I disabled the
internal IDE host adapters (channel 1 and channel 2) and set the memory
range of the controller: 324-327h: CA00-CBFFh. The disc was running
a little bit faster but you can do nothing if the actuator has a high
latency although the internal transfer rate is 7,5Mb/s.