mxdx .?i)iiy$1$jp - Bombjack.org

mind that per kilobyte of online memory, a hafd
drive is more cost efficient than a floppy. A
10 meg drive for $895 comes to about 9.2 cents
per K (cpK) as compared to the 1541 (84 cpK
at $149) or the SFD-1001 (28 cpK at $299).
COMMENTS
The table presents the major features of the
six different hard drives that should be
available by the end of the year. There may
be other hard drives down the road, too. Both
Commodore and Skyles Electric Works (of
Blitz! and 1541 Flash! fame) have recently
made noises in the hard drive direction. But
for now, this is the selection:
D9060 / D9090. Not designed for the 64 but
works fine using an IEEE interface. These
Commodore drives have been discontinued, but
are built like tanks and can still be found.
Many arc in use in BBS systems. I could have
sworn that I saw in some user group newsletter
that warehoused D9060s were being sold 'as is'
for $295, but several frantic searches through
my meticulously maintained files failed to
turn it up. (I've also been told that the D9090
had some quirks...)
ST10C. From Computer Specialties, Inc.
This drive is the only readily available hard
drive for the 64 as I write, and CSI has just
slashed the price by $600, to $995, no doubt in
response to the burgeoning competition. It has
both serial and IEEE connectors, and one of
the STIOC's nicer features is a built-in backup
routine that saves the files on ST10C to any
disk drive that's connected to it, if you can
stand the many hours required to do so.
JCT-1000 Series. These drives should be on
the market (and discounted) by the time you
read this. I talked to Ray Rippcy, JCT's chief
programmer, and several changes and additions
are in order since the feature pre-rcview of the
JCT-1000 in the September 1986 issue of
COMPUTER SHOPPER. A routine for
handling subdirectories (a hard drive must!) has
been added to the operating system. The JCT's
DOS is all in ROM and the only the Master
Jumptable is loaded into the drive's RAM at
startup. This makes modifying the drive's
routines easy! And a dual 10 meg drive (the
JCT-1021) is in the works and due for release
sometime early next year.
ICT DATA CHIEF. This hard drive is
unique in a number of ways. It comes
equipped with a (very) 1541-compatible floppy
drive. It is factory-formatted into 170K
partitions -- about 60 per each 10 megs - for
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enhanced 1541 compatibility. (A special file
chaining command helps to overcome the 170K
file length limitation.) It has a large case and
powerpack for internal expansion to up to 80
megabytes! And finally, it works with both the
64 CP/M cartridge and the 128's CP/M mode
(as a single-sided Commodore 1541 drive only.)
The one difficulty is the lack of a CP/M
command to switch partitions. Also, a second
serial bus connector required for daisychaining
was missing from the pre-production
model.
The chief advantages of adding
a hard disk drive to a system
are having large amounts of
data online at one time, the
capacity for creating very large
REL and 5EQ data files, and the
potential for greater access speeds.
LT. KERNAL. This is the FAST hard drive
that really started the current hard drive
commotion. Rather than creating a 1541 workalike
hard disk, Fiscal Information designed
the Lt. Kernal to be a true (i.e., very fast) hard
drive that is compatible with the Commodore
64 and its software. The Lt. Kernal's DOS is
currently about 170K long, completely
upgradeable and bank-loads as needed into the
expansion port interface's 16K of RAM.
Besides adding over 40 new or improved
commands to the 64's repertoire, the Lt. Kernal
features an ISEPIC-like utility for installing
protected programs on the hard disk in such a
way that they cannot be off-loaded back to a
floppy disk. What about speed? The early
versions of Lt. Kernal could transfer 25K bytes
(a 100 block program) in about one second, or
about 43 times faster than a 1541. The release
version can load or save about 38K in the same
one second. With a 128 in the fast mode, the
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