Comments | crustycurmudgeo: Hard drive ramblings and ruminations.

crustycurmudgeo

Hard drive ramblings and ruminations.

Jun 30, 2011 18:42

A few weeks ago I had to replace the drive in one of JJ's laptops and that went well. But while perusing the Microcenter.com website for a new drive, I looked for some other things too. Like a USB to external 2.5" hard drive enclosure just in case I could eventually recover the old 320 GB drive. Found one for $5 and it was a bargain. Aluminum case ( Read more... )

nerd, technology

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crustycurmudgeo July 8 2011, 02:53:52 UTC

I did the same with Commodore C64 floppies, but they had 180K each side. And it was pretty iffy since only a few disk makers verified both sides were of usable quality. Then the double sided drives came out and we got a whole 360k per disk! Commodore had some good ideas about disk formats, the main root track was the middle track so that file searches involved an average head shift of one quarter of the total tracks, not like Microsloth's always track 0 and 1 scheme that averaged half the tracks.

The first floppy drive equipped system I used was a National COPS 400 MCU development system that used 8" disks with 160k space and an OS that resembled CPM more than anything. The system's CPU was a 16 bit-ish chip set called the IMP-16. The COPS-400 MCUs were darn cool for their time but didn't last that long with consumer products being so volatile.