FWIW, those drives (IMI 5018/5020 were used in Cromemco hard disk systems, but with a different logic board, so if you had a bad IMI interface drive you could replace the drive with an MFM version.
In the other direction you could convert an IMI I/F drive to an MFM drive; in fact, Cromemco sold the MFM PCB as a conversion kit. They were also used by Corvus in their Apple computer and even the Synclavier. On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 10:43 AM jos via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/3/25 23:16, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: > > > > It has an OMTI 20C-1 MFM hard disk controller with a IMI 5018 19MB hard > disk drive in it. > > > > The evidence is anecdotal, I know, but I recovered the contents of 5 40 > year old IMI5019 harddisks used in ETH Lilith computers : all 5 were fully > functional and had zero defects. > > I used David Gesswein's MFM reader, the Lilith uses a WD1001-05 derivative > as the diskcontroller. > > >
