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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Background to Data Storage,
By Acute Observer (By the Shore NJ) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Hard Drive Bible: Book, Cd, and Video (Hardcover)
Hard Drive Bible, VIII Edition
This is a great book for its time, but the ongoing developments of large disks have made a lot of its details obsolete. Much of the historical data is valuable and not readily available to a general audience. Its chapters are not numbered. The use of magnetism for information goes back to around 500 BC when it was used for compasses! In the early 19th century Oersted and Faraday investigated the relation between electricity and magnetism. The first magnetic recording device was patented in 1898 by Poulsen (p.1). The German military used AEG recorders to convert slow speed to high speed for secret transmissions. The first commercially successful digital disk drive was the IBM Model 350 of 1956 (p.2). In the 1960s IBM produced the 1301 Disk Storage unit, and the 1311 Disk pack which had interchangeable units that could hold as much as 25,000 punched cards (2 million characters)! In 1970 IBM announced the 3330 Disk Storage Facility that used the "voice coil" motor to position read/write heads. This method would be used for all micro-computer hard drives. In 1971 IBM produced an 8 inch "diskette" for Initial Program Load [replacing the older 5-card loader]. The first read-write floppy disk was available in 1973 from IBM (p.4). The 3340 Disk Storage Unit had an ultra lightweight recording head that eliminated the need for a head-raising mechanism. Its two platters held 30 million characters; this led to the "30-30" and "Winchester" names. Other competitors produced removable and fixed disk storage units. The floppy disk was also developed to hold more data on a 5.25 inch medium. New development continued for the growing sales of personal computers in the 1980s-1990s. But most disk drive manufacturers lose money! Price competition has killed research efforts, and they concentrate on high volume low-tech products. Optical recorders have the advantage of removability; hard drives are better if they do not need to be removed. Disk drives perform three basic functions of writing, accessing, and reading data. Page 9 explains this, and the following pages go into details on these devices. MFM coding is used on all modern floppy drives. RLL encoding is used for nearly all ESDI, SCSI, and IDE drives (p.18). The original 528 MB limit for IDE was overcome with Enhanced IDE (EIDE), which allows 16 times more heads for a total of 8,400 MB (p.30). A larger block size of 2,048 would allow more addressing space. Newer IDE drives can be accessed using Logical Block Addressing (p.111) Partitioning and formatting are done with the DOS FDISK and FORMAT programs (p.75). [There is no explanation here, and it is needed by first time users.] The book explains how to install a SCSI drive on the Apple Macintosh. Windows 95 uses the DOS FDISK and FORMAT programs (pp.83-84). "Common Installation Problems" are discussed (pp.95-97). "Troubleshooting" hints are on pages 99-109. The more common problems are jumper settings (MS, SL, CS) and cable parity (red stripe to pin 1). The "Track 0 Bad" message means the floppy or hard drive is unreadable. The "Hard Drive Parameters" on pages 123-170 is reference only; so is "Controller Information" (pp.171-198), and "Connector Pin-outs" (pp.199-209). "Drive Jumpers" has some information on older drives (pp.211-278). The rest of the book covers "CD-ROM", "Floppy Drives", "Optical Disk Drive Technology", and, "Tape Drives". The "SOFTWARE" chapter lists the collection of disk utilities included with this book. The "Industry Phone Numbers" and "BBS Numbers" are probably outdated. The "Glossary" defines many of the terms used in this book (pp.377-419).
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent resource on older hard drive specs,
By Michael Miller (Oregon) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Hard Drive Bible: Book, Cd, and Video (Hardcover)
Very clear tables of hard drive specs and jumper settings that are useful to those dealing with older equipment.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
this book wasn't very useful,
By A Customer
This review is from: Hard Drive Bible: Book, Cd, and Video (Hardcover)
I think the book had too much talk about complicated things and the illustrations were terrible.
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