Apple II series disk drive question

From: John Ruschmeyer <jruschme_at_exit109.com>
Date: Tue Sep 2 20:05:03 1997

>>> Does a IIgs 3.5" drive work on the IIe?
>
>The Standard 3.5" drives for the Apple IIgs are Double Density, there are
>the HighDensity drives, but they are spendy!
>
>Not sure if the IIe will handle them or not, if it does it will probably
>require a later version of ProDOS, which in turn will require an enhanced
>IIe (yes, that is a bit redundant, but none the less). The Enhanced IIe's
>seem to be a lot less common than the plain IIe's (I've 3 IIe's and no
>enhanced ones).

Actually, there are three options for running a 3.5" drive on a //e:

1) A Unidisk and its associated controller card. The Unidisk is an
   "intelligent" 3.5" drive which includes its own onboard CPU.
   Cpapacity is 800K.

   FYI, all //c's, except the original ROM revision, include support for the
   Unidisk.

2) An Apple SuperDrive (FDHD) and aoosicated controller. Very rare.
   Capacity 1.44MB.

3) The Laser Universal Disk Controller (UDC) card. This card can drive
   either a Unidisk, a //gs 3.5" drive, or a Mac 800K floppy drive.
   (I think it can also drive a Mac 400K drive.)

   FYI, the Laser 128 family of Apple compatible computers include the
   equivalent of a UDC.

All are supported under ProDos. I believe that only the Unidisk has any
Dos 3.3 support and that requires special patches.

>IIRC an interesting bit on the DuoDisk drives is it's the only way to get
>two 5.25" drives on the IIgs. However there is a downside to the DuoDisk
>you need the drive cable which since it's detachable doesn't always come
>with the drive (that's how I got my second IIe, I bought it for the cable,
>as it was cheaper than buying the cable).

Not true. The //gs can drive two of the Apple 5.25" Drives daisy chained
together. The passthrough conenctor takes care of remapping the drive
select line.

<<<John>>>
Received on Tue Sep 02 1997 - 20:05:03 BST