Seagate Medalist ST31082A, Product Manual

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Technical Reference Manual Page 1
Overview of the Drive
1
What is the Drive?
The Seagate ST3636A, ST31082A and ST1276A are high-performance, low-
profile hard disk drives that are designed to operate with an IBM PC/AT or
equivalent host computer system in translate mode.
Drive Model: Form Factor: Capacity (formatted): No. of disks/heads:
ST3636A inch high, 3.5 inch 635MB 1 disk/2 heads
ST31082A inch high, 3.5 inch 1082MB 2 disks/4 heads
ST31276A inch high, 3.5 inch 1275MB 2 disks/4 heads
Throughout this document, the Medalist 1276 is referred to as the ST31276A,
The Medalist 1082 is referred to as the ST31082A and the Medalist 636 is
referred to as the ST3636A. For simplicity, we often refer to these drives
collectively in this manual as “the drive”.
Features of the Drive
The drive provides these features:
• can be installed in a wide range of host systems
• high-performance rotary voice coil actuator with embedded servo
• one-of-seven run-length limited code
• high shock resistance
• automatic actuator latch against inner stop upon power-down
• microprocessor-controlled diagnostic routines that are automatically
executed at start-up
• PIO mode 4, multiword DMA 2 support
• 64KB buffer with adaptive cache management
• Read Look Ahead and Write Caching
• automatic error correction and retries, ECC on the fly
• 512-byte block size
• emulates IBM Task File and supports additional commands
• allows daisy-chaining up to two drives on the AT interface
• Auto-Translate (Universal Translate)
• Reed-Solomon ECC capable of correcting two 17-bit errors or a single 41-bit
error without incurring additional latency.
• Supports the ATA (AT Attachment) Interface Standard