Ampex PYXIS 27 : Interesting board

[Deksor]

Hello, I just bought this beautiful Ampex PYXIS 27 MFM hard drive.







As you can see it has this weir board ontop of it with a 50 pin connector





What could it be ? A SCSI to MFM adapter dedicated to this hard drive ?
The hard drive itself has a rather weird geometry (maybe it wasn't intended to be used in a PC ? I don't know what machine it came from so maybe this is the wrong section ) : 256 bytes per sector and 32 sectors per cylinder instead of the usual 512 bytes per sector and 17 sectors per cylinder found in PCs.

 

[Chuck(G)]

SASI - I've got the ISA controller board that goes along with this. Part of the Megastore PC

 

[Al Kossow]

Xebec 1410

and there is a high probability that the drive is dead.
Rodyme 10 and 20 meg drives were dogs

 

[Deksor]

Rodyme ? That's an Ampex hdd ^^ Were they related ?

I've plugged the drive to an MFM controller and I ran some tests with SSTOR.
I haven't tried to read/write from it (and its geometry would make the task a bit hard I think), but it responded properly at least.

Do you think I can plug it to a SCSI controller to use it ? Or do I have to find a SASI controller ?

 

[Chuck(G)]

So the Ampex PYXS27 is the same as a Rodime RO-204? I did not know that.

I've still got a system with a working Rodime 40MB MFM drive, so I probably should be grateful.

 

[Deksor]

That's interesting, that means this drive supports 512 bytes sectors afterall. If I can't find a way to use the SASI adapter, I think I'll simply format it as a RO-204.