Date   : Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:16:29 +0100 (BST)
From   : Pete Turnbull <pete@...>
Subject: Re: Viglen Winnie / Miniscribe 3438

On Jul 12 2006, 22:49, Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
>
> Yes, there's a Kalok one in my A410/1 although I am not sure if this
is from the
> time of manufacture or a later addition as the drive was totally
blank when the
> machine arrived.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Philip Pemberton
>
> Pete Turnbull wrote:
> > The Acorn-supplied ones were Tandon and Western Digital.  I've
still
> > got two, working last time I looked.
> >
>
> I think they used a few Kalok drives as well. Can anyone confirm
that?
> I suspect most Kalok drives will be dead - they weren't exactly known
for
> stellar reliability.

I never saw any Kalok drives while I was at Acorn.  The Acorn
ST412-style ones were all WD or Tandon for the smaller sizes (20MB) and
Rodimes for the larger ones (53MB).

The Rodimes have a habit of losing heads :-( though only if the speed
sensor doesn't give up the ghost first :-(

Somewhere I have a Rodime that lost head number 2.  The formatter won't
handle drives with missing heads so I got round that by using a little
TTL logic to remap the order of the head selects, such that the missing
one was the highest number and the formatter would use all the others.
 Well, it seemed like a good idea when drives were so expensive!

-- 
Pete                                           Peter Turnbull
                                               Network Manager
                                               University of York