AT&T 6300 Floppy Drives

[Mark A. Hampson]

Does anyone have a solid explaination as to why the floppy drives of the
AT&T 6300 spin slowly?  I have a large number of these machines that I 
take care of and recently we have been made aware that our machines will
not read diskettes that were formatted on 'normal' IBM type PC's and
compatibles.  Our first reaction was that the drives were dirty as they
see an enourmous amount of use.  Cleaning did not seem to have any effect.
A floppy that was formatted on a 6300 would be read by any other 6300.

I borrowed a program called RediScope which uses the Dysan Digital Test
Diskette and can check disk speed, alignment etc.  Every one of the drives
reported slow. (292 RPM instead of the normal 300+/-5 RPM).  I was told by
the person in charge of maintaining the PC here and he claims that it is
due to the fact that Olivetti designed them to be compatible with the
European 50Hz power.  I find that this explaination has some pretty large
hole in it considering that the drives are built by toshiba and are printed
with markings for 300 RPM at 12VDC.  (Not AC 50 Hz here)

In the 6300 this power comes off of the power supply just like it does in
other PC's and has been checked an is 12VDC, even under load.  (Monitor is
powered from the same supply).

I don't get it, why would you intentionally design outside of the operational
limits of the spec.? :-|  This seems od (if not counter productive) to me?

Looking for answers:

-- 
Mark A. Hampson                                     WPI Mechanical Engineering
Internet: mhampson at wpi.wpi.edu                       Worcester, MA  01609  USA
                                                                (508) 831-5498
              70% of all code is idiot proofing