Maxtor 1140 on 3B2

[Greg A. Woods]

In article <1496 at gagme.chi.il.us> greg at gagme.chi.il.us (Gregory Gulik) writes:
> I'm considering getting a Maxtor 1140 for my 3B2/300.
> But first, are there any problems using those drives
> on the 3B2?  Is it possible to use that as a boot drive?

Of course it works....  I'm running one now, and in the past have had
two working simultaneously on my 400.  They are a fine drive, though I
have had my fair share of problems with "lemons".

The 3b2 can use *any* ST-506 standard drive, assuming one has a copy
of idtools to format it with.

The Maxtor 1140 is interesting in that certain versions of this drive
can theoretically be formatted out to 1224 cylinders.  I've not been
able to get the 3b2 to work past 1024 cylinders, but even that is a
significant increase (the 1140 is by spec. 918 cyl.).  The only way to
find out what your drive can do is try to format it.  Other than the
number of cylinders, you need to know the 1140 has 15 heads.  The rest
is default (18 sectors per track I think).  Make sure you do a
comprehensive verify of the drive if you go past 918 cyl.

If you do a manual mkfs, you might want to try using a gap of 9 (the
number of blocks per cyl. is, of course, 270).  I've not actually
tried too many different gap settings, but this one seemed to make
sense.  There is/was a script to build and test filesystems with
different gaps, but I haven't had a chance to actually run it.
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{robohack,gate,eci386,tmsoft,ontmoh}.UUCP
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