Adaptec 2372 RLL with Seagate ST-4096 MFM

[Paul De Bra]

In article <227 at holmes.home.nwu.edu> matt at holmes.home.nwu.edu (Matthew Larson) writes:
>I'm running SCO 386 XENIX 2.3.2 with a Seagate ST-4096 80 megabyte hard disk
>and I'm considering trying to run it RLL with an Adaptec 2372 controller.
>Is it bad news to try to run MFM drives RLL, or does it depend on the
>particular drive?  Has anyone tried the 4096?  Does anyone have an RLL
>that they like better than the 2372?  And, finally, are there any
>XENIX repercussions of using an RLL controller that I should know about?
>
As far as I know Seagate makes just one kind of drive which they sell
both as a 80Mbyte MFM and a 120Mbyte RLL drive.
There are 2 points of consideration, which unfortunately are contradictory:
1) they supposedly test drives (i.e. media quality) before they label them
   and the ones that are good enough become RLL drives, the others MFM.
2) there is a much larger demand for the MFM drive than for the RLL drive,
   so lots of drives that are good enough for RLL are being sold as MFM.

So if you gen a 4096 you may or may not have one that failed in 1) or one
that didn't fail but was labeled 4096 because of 2).

Paul.
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