Re: Powering the 9114B disc drive without a battery pack Message #4 Posted by Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil) on 8 Nov 2002, 10:16 p.m., in response to message #1 by Tom Sherman (Maine)
Hi;
I've been wondering about it too, and I found one big problem on using AC adapters, even if they are completely safe and free of noise (batteries generate safe and free-of-noise voltage and current, most AC adapters don't). Disk drives need peak current demand when spin motors are switched ON and OFF, and batteries can hold this.
Imagine you're transferring data from your pocket system (HP41, HP7x, HP8x...) to a LIF formatted disk and, at the very moment the directory is being updated, it happens a power loss OR a spike. I know that a FAT or LFS based disk may loose the last file or, in some "hard" cases, the complete directory may be lost (depends on the software you're running). What would happen in a LIF disk? I cannot even think of loosing lots of information because of this.
Maybe I'm talking about impossible things, but I thought about this, and having a battery pack to keep voltage and current in any situation makes me feel better...
My US$ 0.05.
Best regards.
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