pinkdonut666
Experienced Member
I got this 8mhz XT turbo clone machine a while back, It had a WD Filecard installed in it. The hard drive included had a failed capacitor and was smoking like crazy.
interesting I went down the rabbit hole of discovery as this machine had a WD-93048-X XTA or XT-IDE hard drive installed. something at the time I wasn't familiar with.
The 3 drives I know will work with this hard card are the WD93028-X (20mb) which I found on ebay and subsequently got the machine running with. the WD93034-X (30mb) which I wound up with another WD filecard with this drive, frustratingly non functional. and of course the WD93048X (40mb) drive that the PC came with.
I also discovered through much googling the Seagate ST-351A/X drive which can behave in 16bit or 8bit mode. Unfortunately however I ended up bricking the ST351A/X i got my hands on with the WD filecards LLF bios. Like an MFM controller I don't think there is any way to configure the drive parameters in the WD XTA controller without LLFing the drive. (the seagate ST351A/X cannot be low level formatted)
anyways, my question is, does anyone else have any experience with these old XTA drives? From the 5 or 6 of these drives I own now (one of them in my TANDY 1000 TL hard card) I only have 2 that function both the smaller 20mb version. are these drives crap? has anyone had any luck with WD XTA controllers and seagate ST351A/X drives?
I am very familiar with the modern XT-IDE & XT-CF devices but there is something about old school spinning rust that I like, the noise, sound, lack of speed? dunno.