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Seagate 5.25 "vaporware" drives ST206 and ST278

Very interesting and rare find with that ST-278R drive, and probably one of the best guarantee stickers ever!

The ST277 and ST251 are basically the same drive and the ST-251 will work OK as RLL, but it might have a higher error rate and it is likely the data won't be as reliable for long term storage as a legit ST-277. The boards between these models can generally be swapped as/if needed. The ST-251 control boards tend to have a higher failure rate than other models, but they're still awesome drives. Auto park heads yeah!

https://ibm.retropc.se/manuals/Seagate_ST21_Installation_Guide.pdf

I believe these controllers will do dynamic config and will go up 1024 cylinders. I'm wondering if perhaps your PC has a configurable BIOS and might be the 615 cyl limit? Is it by chance limited to 32MB partition because of DOS version or formatting utility limitation?

Do you have any more pics of the ST-278R to show the control board side? Thanks for sharing the info about the drive.
 
Were there any other 5.25" IDE drives besides the Quantum Bigfoot series?

There were a small number of drives made by Gigastorage (aka Belfort Memory International), a startup that purchased what was developed by Priam. Using 1997 Disk Trends as a reference, there were almost 5 million Bigfoot drives made but only about 27,000 5.25" drives made by manufacturers other than Quantum in the capacity range of 1 to 5 GB. Gigastorage would be a subset of that.
 
https://ibm.retropc.se/manuals/Seagate_ST21_Installation_Guide.pdf

I believe these controllers will do dynamic config and will go up 1024 cylinders. I'm wondering if perhaps your PC has a configurable BIOS and might be the 615 cyl limit?

I think it is something weird with just the Seagate boards and the built-in hard disk utility in the AMI bios I'm using. None of the other controllers I've been testing have the 615cyl
limit. I'll try bringing up DOS and running the real Seagate formatting utility to see if I can find the root cause. This happens with the last eproms I know of for the controller (1.5/1.7)
 
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