On 11/15/19 10:51 AM, allison via cctalk wrote: > I must have about 15 maybe more of the D540s and have found them > to be the fastest seeking of the MFM drives and also near unbreakable. > The oldest is about 36 years old. Use them in CP/M crates, DOS boxen, > PDP-11s (with RQDX2/3 controllers) and Local swap for net booted > uVAX2000 and swap file disks on uVAXII (61K blocks is more than > enough swap space) for VMS5.44. > > I've not had stiction problems... likely because I have spares! > Its a Murphy's law thing.
The Q540 that gets used is mounted on its side in an old Mad Intelligent Systems box with an XT clone inside. I don't think it's stiction; the drive spins up fine, but the initial seek fails until I cycle power a couple of times or tap the side of the drive with a screwdriver handle. It's of no real consequence; the contents are backed up and I have a spare XT-IDE drive if needed. The FH MFM drives that I've owned have slowly failed; the FH ESDI and SCSI drives have, interestingly all continued to work. --Chuck
