Mator Shark Hard Drive

The Mator Shark is an IEEE-488 hard drive for the Commodore PET/CBM computers. To say this drive is “large” would be an understatement. Its footprint makes CBM dual floppy drives like the 8050 look compact.

The Mator Shark has an 8085-based motherboard that is larger and has more chips than any of the PET motherboards. It uses a massive Priam 3450 mechanism that has two circuit boards of its own, with three 8″ platters inside. Between the mechanism and the 6″ fan mounted in the rear, the noise this drive makes must be heard to be believed.

Capacity

The Priam 3450 mechanism has an unformatted capacity of 30 MB. After formatting, the Mator Shark splits this into two logical drives (0 and 1, as with CBM dual floppy drives). One of the logical drives (drive 0) reports 41124 blocks free after formatting.

As with the CBM 9060/9090, the Mator Shark does not appear to support subdirectories. It presents all of the space in its each of its logical drives as a single massive directory.

DOS

The DOS responds the same as a Commodore drive would. The usual commands like scratch, validate, and new all work as expected. Listing a directory works as it would on Commodore unit, as does loading and saving programs. Upon power-up, it reports:
```
73,MATOR/CBM WINCHESTER DOS V1/FW,0,0
```
EPROM Contents

The motherboard contains 22 KB of ROM in six EPROMs (five 2732s, one 2516). The IC sockets are not labeled so I have numbered them in the photo below.

1. 2732 “PCH488 3450 V22.1 #1”
2. 2732 “PCH488 3450 V22.1 #2”
3. 2732 “PCH488 3450 V22.1 #3”
4. 2732 “PCH488 3450 V22.1 #4”
5. 2732 “PCH488 3450 V22.1 #5”
6. 2516 “MICRO P3450 V1.3”

Software

This program was found on the drive:
matordiscdiag.prg.bin – Mator Shark diagnostics program

Documentation

System Description
Installation Guide
DOS Enhancements
Diagnostics Guide

Photos

Mator Shark Photos on Flickr

Resources

Priam 3450 Manual
Announcement (TORPET, Jan 1982)
Article (Microcomputing, Dec 1983)
Advertisement (Commodore Magazine, Aug/Sep 1982)
Listing (Using Your Computer: Commodore Applications Catalogue)