On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Matthew Haas wrote:
> Wow.. so there were really SCSI floppy drives at one point. I take it they
> were used largely on pre-SPARC machines, but are they still around? Are
> they still manufactured? How's compatibility with FM floppy drives? What
> are the densities? From what I've read and seen, my SPARCstation 2 has an
> FM-based floppy drive, is this correct?
They were usually 360k for 5.25" models, 720k or 1.44mb for 3.5". All
that I knew of were FM (as opposed to GCR) and the older units had a
Shugart SASI/SCSI host adaptor built in. Newer units used commodity
drives (usually Sony) with a truly intelligent builtin controller
(Fujitsu used the NCR5380, don't know about the others).
Your Sparc 2 has a 1.44mb FM-based drive by Sony. It's an identical unit
to those found in PC's except for the addition of autoeject. In fact,
this unit will fit in a PC, and by running the eject line to a spare
strobe (such as found on a PC parallel port) you too can have
software-ejectable floppies.
Some more recent Suns have a triple-density 2.88mb floppy drive, but very
few people ever take advantage of it.
> Sorry for being off-topic, but I was amazed to read of a SCSI floppy
> drive... It has been one of those "wouldn't it be cool if" things. Any
> pointers to additional information on them?
They're actually very common (or were). Andataco and Fujitsu made a
number of them at one time. The old SCSI 22mb Floptical drives could
handle regular floppies too, and usually had autoeject built in.
I'm somewhat surprised you haven't heard of them, they were de riguer on
small unix systems in the 80's that needed to interface with PC's. Cheap
networking hardware has made them nearly obsolete.
--
James D. Lockwood The (former) Getty Information Institute
System Administrator 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 300
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Los Angeles, CA 90049-1680
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