vwestlife
Veteran Member
I refer you to the IBM 5170 Technical Reference, page 9-5 "Diskette Drive Compatibility".
The IBM AT used Ye-Data drives that were noisy and, in my experience, generally unreliable. So, too, were the Qume drives used in the PCjr and Portable PC -- IBM even had to modify DOS in version 2.1 to slow down the disk timing to make the Qume drives work right!
And then there are also people who claim that you have to low-level format a stepper-motor MFM/RLL hard drive every six months, to account for seasonal temperature changes, or else you'll get read/write errors and data corruption. Meanwhile, the ST-225 in my 5150 hasn't been formatted since 1998, and it still works perfectly to this day...