ST-506 hard drive emulation

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Gordon JC Pearce" <gordon at gjcp.net>
>
>Tony Duell wrote:
>> 
>> That's a secondary issue. Once you have something that looks like an 
>> ST506 drive to any controller you care to name, and which stores the 
>> bitstream in semicondcutor memory, you can then consider a server that 
>> loads images from, say, a SCSI drive into that memory.
>
>I think you're overthinking this.  I can't see it being that hard to 
>adapt the mechanical bits of a different drive to a given set of 
>electronics.  Come to that, I don't really see how it could be that hard 
>to repair ST506 drives, assuming they had not suffered a catastrophic 
>head crash.

Hi
 I have several that were destroyed by someone mecahnically
rotating the media backwards. The trailing edge of the heads
have a razor sharp edge that will dig into the media. Units
without the brake can be damaged by handling as well. The
danger is reduced if the heads are parked since the linear
shift is smaller for a given amount of rotation but how many
systems actually park the drives before powering off or
even have a park for a person to use before transport.
 Of all the units I've collected over the years ( less than
10 I'll admit ) the most comon failure was a surface failure.
Dwight

>
>They were built in relatively dirty environments compared to today's 
>clean rooms, out of bits that were very high precision *then* but pretty 
>crappy now.  If I can walk into my local SKF or Timken stockist and pick 
>up the incredibly obscure bearings for my gearbox off the shelf, why not 
>a hard disk?
>
>Gordon.
>
>