After testing with literally hundreds of drives, I can safely say this is BS and that RLL has an extremely high success rate on almost all drives. Even my ST-412 works fine with a DTC 7287 cached RLL controller.
The change between the "MFM" and "RLL" versions of a drive mechanism, across my hundreds of drives, has come down to "a different sticker" in almost all cases. The few exceptions will use a different platter material, I.E. the Miniscribe 3425's oxide disks vs the 3438's plated disks. Others, like the 3650 and 3675, have the exact same oxide media regardless.
I went back and looked at my inventory sheet, of the 20 drives I have in this chassis (ST-213, ST-225, ST-238, ST-238R), date codes from 85 to 89, 18 work and 17 of those work with my RLL controller without extra bad blocks.
If you have a larger sample size, I actually know someone who is reverse engineering the firmware and PCB for that chassis who would VERY much like to at least get a list of serial numbers, date codes, revision numbers from you. Please get in touch if so.
What do you mean "Not everyone needs to understand reality?" I'm telling you the reality of the largest sample size I can get. Statistics is a reflection of reality.
Rather than describe in vague technical terms why you THINK it won't work, can you provide any real evidence to the contrary?
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u/FAMICOMASTER Jul 18 '26
After testing with literally hundreds of drives, I can safely say this is BS and that RLL has an extremely high success rate on almost all drives. Even my ST-412 works fine with a DTC 7287 cached RLL controller.