Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: Gerrit Heitsch <gerrit_at_laosinh.s.bawue.de>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 11:46:47 +0100
Message-ID: <11bb9345-aa0e-e827-735b-96eee45e73f2@laosinh.s.bawue.de>
On 1/4/19 10:41 AM, André Fachat wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 4. Januar 2019 10:26:14 schrieb André Fachat <afachat@gmx.de>:
> 
>>
>>
>> Am 3. Januar 2019 20:01:30 schrieb "Mike Stein" <mhs.stein@gmail.com>:
>>
>>> I wonder if part of the answer to Andre's original question may be 
>>> the fact that Bits per inch is not necessarily the same as Flux 
>>> transitions per inch/mm...
>>
>> Absolutely. 300 Oersted media had 5900 flux transitions per inch, 
>> which gives 2900 bpi using FM due to the many clock bits needed, or 
>> 5900 bpi using MFM. QD was the same media, only was defined for 96/100 
>> tpi instead of 48 tpi.
>>
>> Commodore GCR 170k used 250kHz write frequency,  thus the same 5900 
>> flux transitions per inch, i.e. 4us bit cells.
>> Commodore GCR 500k used 375kHz writes, which increases ftpi by 50% and 
>> reduced bit cell size by 33%. Which seems to be out of spec with all 
>> Media specifications I found.
> 
> And, BTW, MFM ist actually more efficient than Commodore GCR.
> 
> MFM uses 16 cells at 500kHz, i.e. 16 x 2us = 32us per byte.
> Commodore GCR uses 10 cells at 250kHz, i.e. 10 x 4us = 40us.

But the final drive implementation still resulted in Commodore drives 
with their custom logic fitting more data onto the same media than 
compared to MFM drives using a standard controller.

  Gerrit
Received on 2019-01-04 12:00:03

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