On June 17, ball@roam.eiu-newman.org wrote:
> Thanks to Jochen and Kees for your useful links.  It seems
> likely that I still have many of these old MFM drives in
> an attic in Wales - they'll make interesting carry-on
> luggage next time I visit there!
> 
> It looks as though the RD3x were 5.25" half-hight drives,
> which might leave room for another device (perhaps a
> larger, faster SCSI drive).  I'm wondering whether an MFM
> drive could be just large enough to boot a kernel, and then
> powered down once the machine was properly up.  What are
> people's thoughts on this?
> 
> Regards,
>   - Andy Ball
> 
> ---------------------------<snip>---------------------------
>                                                Watts
> DEC   Equivalent        Cyl  Hd Spt Spc  Mb   Max  Typ
> RD31  Seagate ST225      615  4 17   68   21   33   15
> RD32  Seagate ST251-1
> 
> DEC   Equivalent        Cyl  Hd Spt Spc  Mb   Max  Typ
> RD50  Seagate ST506      153  4 17   68    5   47   23
> RD51  Seagate ST412      306  4 17   68   11   50   26
> RD52  Quantum Q540       512  8 17  136   36
> RD53  Micropolis 1325   1024  8 17  136   71   51   29
> RD54  Maxtor XT2190     1224 15 17  255  160   64   27

  Umm, where did these specs come from again?  If memory serves (and
I'm pretty sure it does in this case) the RD32 was a Seagate ST251,
not an ST251-1.  Not that there's THAT much difference (40ms vs. 28ms)..

  But yes, I suppose the use of an MFM drive to load the kernel from
would do fine, though I've never tried this myself on a '2000.  I'm
doing that with an AlphaPC 164...I'm loading my kernel from a crap IDE
drive, which then mounts its filesystems from a real disk (a big zippy
IBM 36GB LVD drive on a big zippy Qlogic QLA-1080).  The scheme works
fine with that hardware.

         -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd