The Sinclair QL Forum

tofro wrote:I am not sure whether I would invest a lot of money in that box (other than for nostalgia). The Miracle Harddisk use ST506 drives to my knowledge - like 15 years out of production now. If the drives goes bad - not improbable, after this long time - you won't find a replacement drive easily.

But it is really a very rare beast.

Tobias

Ah so it is not an IDE interface?

No - it is not an IDE interface unfortunately.

The driver also comes on a microdrive cartridge - although I do have copies of that...

As for selling to Europe - I never really find this too much of an issue - my main problems are caused by people's expectations over shipping times - I invariably get people moaning after 2 or 3 weeks that their item has not turned up - "is this a con" they ask - not helped when someone in Germany leaves feedback saying "arrived in 2 days wow!".

ebay do not help - they give expected delivery dates to the whole of europe for around 5 working days.

It all depends on the country - my experience is that most items sent to Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal (in particular) take about 4 weeks - rarely any less - oddly these are the countries where there have been major cut backs in services. Germany can be a few days. Russia can be 4 months! However, try telling the buyers in those countries that it is their own country's postal service which is at fault and they will not hear it.

I still sometimes end up sending out replacements and claiming back for lost items - despite my name and address, and the recipients names and address clearly on each packet and on the enclosed invoice. That said I have had items returned to me 6 months later marked 'Not called for....' despite the recipient asking 20 times or so at their local post office!!

I have a Rodime ST506 drive in good, working order that I can make available. I also have a number of tested good 512K cards from a Thor. I was unable to fix its video problems.

What do the cards do and what do they fit?

They fit a Thor 20 (the non-QL-based Thor) - it has 512KB on board RAM, plus 3 slots for additional RAM. If anyone has unpopulated slots, I have three cards available. Or it might be 1MB. I don't know. But they work. The Thor passes the POST fine - just the display is unusable.

I used to have a 40Mb Miracle Hard Drive similiar to this one on Ebay. The hard drive plugs into the QL Rom Socket and provides an extension Rom socket on top of the Hard Drive case.

There is an rom in the hard drive unit that boots the system up from the internal hard drive unit. Well actually it is a Hard Card.

No need to boot from a microdrive or disk.

The Hard Drive was compatiable with Gold/Super Gold, Trump Cards

I ran a BBS in the 1992-1996 on a QL with this type of Hard Drive with Qbox, then late Pbox BBS software.

Derek

Sounds great!

There are soon going to be a couple of very cost effective, very reliable, very low power, very quick designs that make no noise and little heat. The only reason to buy a hard drive system now is to be a collector

*chomp at bit*

Mr_Navigator wrote:Now here is something very interesting and worth bidding on, if more information can be found

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SINCLAIR-QL-H ... 485f4a7e07

Updated with more pics