Pimp my hard drive

[bendix]

The thread "Replacing an old laptop HD with a CF memory" inspired me to look for a SCSI Replacement of my not very reliable 20 MB MFM drive. I have a Future Domain TMC 850 M and lynchaj and hargle provided me with the correct BIOS eprom chip so that SCSI HDs are now bootable. The goal was to find a solution that would fit into the case without removing one of the floppy drives. I have a friend who is a chip distributor. He had an old 2,5 " Solid State SCSI Drive on stock, which he was kind enough to donate to my little project. The HD is a M-Systems FFD 250 with a capacity of 256 MByte. I made a few pictures (sorry for the poor quality, I only had my cell phone camera at hand).

http://www.wenthe.de/images/5150.jpg

http://www.wenthe.de/images/ffd250.jpg

As you can see, the 2,5 drive nicely fits into the space near to the speaker. I only needed a cable fixer to attach it to the front plate.

http://www.wenthe.de/images/tmc850.jpg

Here you can see the boot messages of that eprom that sailed across the atlantic...

http://www.wenthe.de/images/checkit.jpg

And finally "the benchmark". Checkit finds it 2,61 times faster than the original XT drive (b.t.w. what drive is that?) and shows a very good access time of 2,0 ms.

Besides it's absolutely quiet (nice in a 5150 with its quiet PSU fan) and stays much cooler than an ordinary scsi drive.

[tezza]

I made a few pictures (sorry for the poor quality, I only had my cell phone camera at hand).

Actually, they are not bad for a cell phone photo. Well done on a successful project!

I just love seening that crisp monochrome green PC screen. :)

Tez