This picture shows my Technomatic Winchester sitting very happily on top of my Acorn FileStore. The drive was switched on at the time because I took the picture on the same day that my Acorn Teletext Adapter arrived and I was copying the Teletext Filing System ROM images from the Winchester on to floppy at the time. Unfortunately the picture does not show the drive light operating.

The unit has a green LED just underneath the serial number ticket. In addition, the disc itself has a red LED located to the right of the unit and which can be seen to flash at the same time as the green one.

The Winchester is in a glass fronted cupboard on the floor. I keep the door closed to keep the noise down. The drive is just a bit bigger than a standard double disc drive and weighs about the same as a Cub Monitor.

It connects to Station 1 via the 1 MHz Bus. I have had an extension lead made otherwise it would not reach the Master. The black band you can see where the lead is about the join the extension is not a bit of insulating tape or anything to cover up damage. It is a label on the ribbon cable which says on the other side "1 MHz Bus" with a big arrow.

Under ADFS, my Technomatic Winchester formats to 28MB. I think it has 615 cylinders (ie. tracks), 4 heads and 32 sectors per track. I have never been able to multiply, divide, subtract, add or otherwise mathematically manipulate these numbers to get to 28 megabytes. However those are the format parameters I put in and that is the size it came out with!

This is the first hard disc I have ever had for a BBC. I am still amazed at the speed of the thing compared to floppies. It will do a *SRLOAD without the Q option faster than a floppy disc with Q! When you press BREAK, it takes no time at all to mount the disc - I usually think I am in FADFS!