View source for Tandy 1000 Hard Card

[[Tandy]] offered a [[Hard Card]] for it's [[Tandy 1000 Series]] of (broadly) IBM compatible PCs to provide hard drive storage.  Capacities of 20 and 40MBs were offered.

== Controller ==

Typically [[Western Digital]] 8-bit ISA controllers were used such as the [[Western Digital WD 61-000347]], an early IDE controller designed to operate with 8-bit [[IBM XT|XT]] class machines.

== Drives ==

The drives were typically of the slow stepper-motor design, such as the [[Western Digital WD93028-X]] IDE drive.

== Performance ==

The formating utility for the cards provided by Tandy used an [[Interleave]] of 3:1, which unfortunately the controller and CPU combination could not keep up with, hence for MFM drives a full 17 revolutions were required to read a track, resulting in disk transfer rates of just 40KB/s.

By reformatting the drives with an [[Interleave]] of 4:1, sequential performance could be boosted over four times, to around 160KB/s.

== See Also ==

*[[Hard Card]]
*[[Tandy]]
*[[RLL Hard Drives]]
*[[MFM Hard Drives]]
*[[IDE]]