Date   : Wed, 25 Apr 1990 17:42:19 GMT
From   : sumax!quick!amc-gw!sigma!flash!bill@beaver.cs.washington.edu (William Swan)
Subject: 8" drives and BBSes

In article <IO=2M+Cxds13@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
writes:
>Has anyone got some data on BBSes running on 8" drive machines? I'd think with
>the floppy spinning all the time you'd expect to have a big problem with disks
>wearing out. Is this a real problem in practice, or am I inventing reasons not
>to run a BBS?

I don't know about floppy life while just turning, but you *don't* want
to leave the drive spinning with the head loaded.

Alspa Computer had a customer who was complaining about short disk life;
in several (3?) days of constant operation the disk would wear through.
After we spent some time examining the heads of the Tandon drives (which
had a manually operated head load mechanism - when the disk is inserted
the head is down) and finding no rough spots, I saw on one of the disk
boxes a spec of something like 1 million revs life.

Well, 1 million revs turns out to be about 2 days of constant use. The
guy was just simply wearing out the directory track!!

At that discovery we implemented automatic motor on/off control in the 
BIOS. End of (that) problem.




-- 
Bill Swan      bill@Summation.WA.COM          Send postal address for info:
       Innocent but in prison in Washington State for 13.5 years (or more):
       Ms. Debbie Runyan: incarcerated 01/1989, scheduled release 07/2002.
                          In now:  1 year,   3 months,  0 weeks,  5 days.