DRIVE SERIES SPECIFICATIONS
1200-Series of rigid disk systems
| Model Number |
1201-1 |
1202-1 |
1203-1 |
| Capacity (MFM) |
7MB |
20MB |
35MB |
| Platters |
1 |
2 |
3 |
| Heads / Data Surfaces |
1 |
3 |
5 |
Overview
The Micropolis 1200 series of hard disk drives is a lineup of three models of full height 8-inch storage devices.
Designed in 1979 and introduced in 1982, they represent a first step in Micropolis' early storage solutions. The actual platter
containment is of lower height, making space for a controller board sandwiched on top while fitting the 8 inch Shugart mounting slot.
Note that the drives in this series all have a proprietary ANSI inferface.
As Micropolis Corporation's first step into hard-disk technology, these drives share many traits with their floppy disk
predecessors. These early drives have no fixed formatting. Instead, the magnetic surface can be utilized to write any format of
data inside tracks and even track density is variable. The controller board in use determines the format written.
Common choices are MFM and GCR encoding schemes. Please refer to the series' specifications below for differences in
capacity and performance with MFM and GCR encoding. The device's mechanical drive mechanism is accurate enough to satisfy
positioning needs of MFM, GCR and RLL encoded information on the platter.
MFM is short for "
Modified frequency modulation".
RLL means "
Run-length limited".
GCR abbreviates "
Group coded recording".
These hard disk drives were sometimes marketed as
Micropolis MicroDisk™ as they were - despite their large
outer envelope from todays perspective - designed to be used with "mini" and "microcomputers" of the time.
Micropolis used the "MicroDisk™" model name on a number of products. For the early 1200 series 8-inch hard-disk drives described here
but, mainly, for the simple external storage subsystems
670/1030 which carried the name MicroDisk.
When the Raidion series of stackable SCSI subsystems was introduced, an early production run was also labeled MicroDisk.
Video of Model 1203-1
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