Regarding the age of MFM drives (I don't think they have been in use anymore since at least 15 years) I'm sure you won't be able to find anything as a direct replacement.

This may sound insane, but have you tried replacing the OMTI 5200 with an OMTI 5200i?  The OMTI 5200 appears to me to be a SCSI to MFM adapter while the 5200i is the SCSI to IDE adapter.  Both support floppy drives.  Do you know which revision of the 5200 card you have?

It looks like you're running an embedded application.  It may be easier to help you with the issue if I knew the specifics of the overall system.  There are a number of process and manufacturing controls as well as a boatload of telecommunications products that were all based upon the SBE 68kSBC's.  It is possible that you could do an inplace upgrade of even the SBE modules to the current release units that support SATA, USCSI3 or IDE devices.  The simplest and cheapest solution (other than a forklist upgrade) sounds like it may be the 5200i though.

I hope this helps,

Walkabout

if your drive has failed, you can buy some here.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=buy+st225

Thanks for the responses so far. Yes indeed, MFM drives are several years old. and yes, I can still find replacements on occasion, sometimes even NOS drives (Ebay is a great thing!). But even NOS drives are OLD. Someday these will be hard to find, and even in the best of times, their reliability is not the greatest. And unlike a fine wine, I don't expect these drives will get any better sitting on a shelf somewhere. That's why I'm interested in some sort of solid state replacment. My hope was that there might be a large enough need among legacy products that someone might have commercially produced such a replacement.

Yes Walkabout, I'm familiar with the 5200I board. In this legacy product's later life, we indeed switched to the I version and used IDE drives. I wouldn't mind getting a solid state replacement for those as well. :)

The product is an embedded application. It's a daVinci Color Corrector for the post production industry. It started out life running Regulus 4.2A on a 68000 based SBE Multibus SBC. An M68K10 in fact. with a Matrox RGB Alpha Multibus graphics card for a monochrome text based user interface. In later models, it got upgraded to a 68020 MPU-28 board running Regulus 4.2E. Then toward end of life for the product, the OMTI 5200 was upgraded to a 5200I and IDE drives replaced the MFM drives. Then we moved to a super duper rocket powered SGI Indy computer and a nice graphical gui interface. And so on...

I'm still hoping someone might come up with a suggestion for a commercial non-moving replacment. If not, I guess we'll keep getting those NOS hard drives whenever we can.

Regards,
Dwaine

It may be a long shot, but if you already have an IDE interface available try this further converter to compactflash

http://www.dpie.com/storage/cfcada1.html

Talk to the folks at M Systems.   They have solid state IDE drives. http://www.m-systems.com/

I bet they can fix you up.

I think Walkabout has it, I used to mend stuff with ST506 disks and there was sometimes a SCSI or SASI formatter card bolted to the top of them to convert the analog MFM into something the processor could use. We replaced them with disks with imbedded SCSI controllers without any hassle so you can test their theory by seeing if it will work with a SCSI disk before you buy a RAM disk.