On 2014-07-22 at 00:55:17, Justin (shadow@darksideresearch.com) wrote: > >> largely avoiding the > >>> start-up latency by turning on early and delaying turn-off. > >>> SD is certainly entitled to prefer fiddling with jumpers and needlessly > >>> spinning unselected diskettes, > >> "Fiddling" takes less than a minute. > > I disagree. The MFM controllers in particular sometimes had a large number of jumpers > and the time required to cycle through them when a drive’s specifications/format were > poorly documented in the materials available at the time could be considerable if you > had to keep rebooting after every permutation. I ran into this more than once and it was > especially annoying in the cases that others have mentioned here where despite using > an MFM controller card from the same MFR as the system the drive came out of, no permutation > would make the drive readable. Maybe we talk about different time frames. I installed, repaired, replaced and reconfigured literally hundreds of Amiga drives (there weren't *that* many models of them - true but still there were lots of different ones) and never ran into problem finding the DS selector. Usually it was obvious at virtually the first glance. During the same time period I ran many times (not hundreds but tens probably) into situations when I had to "fiddle" with cables in the PCs of the same time. -- SD! Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2014-07-22 00:00:02
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