Archaeology: MFM / ST-506 Interface Reference

Connect it up, power it up, and hope that your drive likes your controller card.  I use Seagate drives (st-225 and -st251) on an Omti 5520 controller, which seems to work well.  If all is good, prepare it for use.  Bear in mind you will need to use a controller-specific utility to low level format your drive…

You will probably find that the drive is noisy: this is really to be expected from a 20 year old piece of delicate electronic equipment. Feel the weight of the thing and, if you’re brave, hold it whilst it powers up: the gyroscopic effect from those heavy platters is really quite marked! You will hear a knocking from the drive as it powers up, and the 225 will knock quietly when it powers down due to the neat autopark feature of this drive that turns the motor into a generator to power the stepper motor to move heads to the parking zone.

Resources: ST-225 manual, ST-251 manual,ST506 OEM Manual(Apr81), ST412 OEM manual(Apr82)

My MFM drives live on a Spirit HDA-506 interface on an Amiga 1000.  See the Review for more information!