Hard Disk Drive 2 - Morley Electronics
I have been on the look out for a larger Winchester drive for my Master 128
for some time now, when I decided to check out whether Morley Electronics still
supplied them. After a lengthy discussion with their technical staff, I was
informed that they could now only supply SYQUEST removable drives, due to the
lack of availability of the lower capacity Winchesters these days. After much
deliberation, I decided to order one.
For the benefit of those who have not come across these devices, the drives
are essentially similar to floppy drives, except that the removable hard disk
is encased in a rigid plastic case 13.6cm square and 1.2cm thick and therefore
the slot to insert the disk must be bigger! The drives behave, as you would
expect, exactly as a normal Winchester, but with the added benefit of a single
drive being able to have any one of a number of removable hard disks (or
cartridges as they are more correctly called) mounted for use.
The hard drive itself is the smallest I have seen for our 8-bit machines. I
have given the sizes of the cases of all the Winchesters that I have used below
for comparison (all dimensions in cm):-
Drive Width Height Depth
Cumana 20 Meg 15.2 10.2 37.0
Watford 30 Meg 24.2 10.0 37.0
Acorn 30 Meg 33.7 10.0 36.5
Morley/Syquest 44 Meg 15.5 9.0 25.5
When I ordered the drive, I also ordered two 44 Meg cartridges for use in
it. The bare drive costs 399 plus VAT and the cartridges 50 plus VAT each.
Whilst the initial cost of the drive is high, the cost of the cartridges is
very reasonable, and provides a cheap way to have a lot of high performance
storage.
The drives themselves are very fast in operation, and appear to be faster
than either the Cumana or the Acorn Winchesters, though I have not yet
performed my full set of tests on them.
The nice feature of a removable disk is just that, you can remove it!
Before the drive is powered up, it is usual to load the required cartridge into
the drive first, and then power up the drive. To change the cartridge, it is
simply a matter of entering '*DISMOUNT' followed by '*BYE' and the disk spins
down to a stop to allow you to remove it. You can then insert another cartridge
and then '*MOUNT' the drive, which brings the disk up to speed, to gain access
to it.
S Richardson K2O.