MFM Hard Drive Adapter (Guru's Advice Please)

[AMDXTREME]

Hi, I'm in the need for know-how. I'm a PC Technician and have been for 3 years now. MFM, however, is a drive interface technology that I'm ignorant to. I have a customer that uses these drives on a regular basis for his equipment. He's a technician for some sort of industrial automation equipment. Anyway, I would be most appreciative on some advice on his best solution for obtaining either the legacy drives or an adapter to use on modern day scsi equipment.

Budget per drive or drive/adapter combo is about $80.00. I figure if there is a way to adapt MFM connector to 50 or 68 pin drives, I can pick up remanufactured drives for about $20-30.00. Anyways, thanks for any advice. I have tried searching the net and have found some information, but, I would just like to know for sure without raising the hopes of my excellent customer.

His drive that he uses normally is Seagate ST-213 11MB formatted.

[Top Nurse]

Ebay? Junkyard?

I don't believe it is possible to adapt this old drive technology to a modern day mb. However, it might be possible to stick an old XT or AT 8 bit MFM controller card into a new style mb if you can find one that has a ISA slot. When IDE first came out there were some of us who still used MFM drives in this manner.

BTW, I got a Seagate 20mb half height hd for sale with a black :cool: face.

The XT abd AT's are still good for simple industrial automation tasks that use DOS. I still use a XT for a packet radio setup (ham radio).

[Lazn_Work]

Umm upgrade to SCSI or IDE.. Even an XT should have 8 bit ISA slots at minimum, and it should be easier to get a ISA controller and a more modern HD for the old systems than to find that old stuff.

What is he dealing with? A dedicated computer that can only use MFM drives? or is he trying to put the old drives into a newer computer?

If the first, like I said get a SCSI or IDE ISA card, if the 2nd, just transfer the data to a modern HD.

==>Lazn

[Phoenix86]

MFM is ancient disk technology. I think I had an MFM harddrive in my old IBM PC jr. Anyways, it's not compatible with IDE. I would recommend moving the data to a more modern disk controller like IDE and ditching MFM, heck even my 286 had the updated ARLL system.

Why are you working with MFM? The fact that something is done on a MFM disk AMAZES me.

[Top Nurse]

Why are you working with MFM? The fact that something is done on a MFM disk AMAZES me.

Because it works...sometimes it even works better :p