Dual drive emulation on Seagate only


Tip
Editor's note: In an earlier letter, Anthony Bouffler suggested dual drive emulation as an alternative to disk partitioning. Other readers have since asked for more information. Anthony very kindly replied with this news:

I am pleased that my letter was received with interest by your readers, although I wonder if I explained myself clearly enough. After receiving your letter I have made some initial inquiries to a number of the hardware distributors in Brisbane, and was told that Western Digital Drives and Quantum Drives cannot be configured in this way. I am not sure about Maxtor, and Conner Peripherals has just merged with Seagate Technology so I don't know what's happening there.
Apparently the only drives with this feature are Seagate -- the Decathlon series and their new Medalist series being two of their latest releases, amongst others. I am sorry to say that my first letter stated that most drives can be configured in this way, but on investigation this, unfortunately, is not the case. By talking to the sales people at the distributors for the various drives, I found the Seagate distributors knew all about this configuration, but the Quantum agents had never heard of this method and it took a fair bit of explaining to make them realise that this method is possible.
It seems that even among some of these vendors and distributors the common misapprehension is that you simply partition the drive to get under the 528Mb limit, but as I said the translation parameters must first be entered into the CMOS, and the old BIOSs won't accept more than 1,024 cylinders. I first stumbled on this method in the so-called "Bible", Scott Muellers' book Upgrading and Repairing PCs (a very small mention in one of the chapters on hard disks).
I had settled on a Seagate and did not look at anything else; as a result I wrongly assumed that some of the other manufacturers would do the same. It appears that the newer Seagate drives are the only ones that can be configured in this way. I hope that this will provide some assistance in answering the readers' inquiries.
- Anthony Bouffler

Category: Hardware
Issue: Sep 1996
Pages: 166

These Web pages are produced by Australian PC World © 1997 IDG Communications