PLI TurboFloppy for Mac

From: Tom Owad <owad_at_applefritter.com>
Date: Tue May 29 21:35:40 2001

I finally had a chance to look at that SCSI floppy drive I mentioned on
the list a few weeks ago and a few people wanted to hear more about.
It's interesting. The drive is built by PLI and named the TurboFloppy
1.4. It can only read and write 1.4MB disks, no 400k or 800k (and I
complained about USB disk drives not being able to!).

The manual keeps stating that the drive does not have an auto-eject and
the picture on the box shows the drive with an eject button, but the
drive that I got simply has a paper clip hole like any other Mac drive,
so presumably it supports auto-eject.

I've been trying to get the drive to work with an LC 580 without much
luck (the other older SCSI Mac I have handy is my Color Classic and I'm
not about to hook a strange drive up to it). I've tried various SCSI
ID's without any luck. With termination turned off, the computer boots
as if the drive was not even attached. With termination on the drives
attempts to read the disk at startup and then the Mac begins to boot,
hanging at the 'MacOS Starting up...' screen before any extensions are
visibly loaded.

It strikes me as a SCSI problem, so I think I'm next going to try it with
a hd-less Mac Plus or SE (something from around the time period it was
made) and see how it reacts to that. The manual mentions a disk
containing the files 'TurboCache' and 'TurboBack'. If anybody should
have them I'd love a copy.

Reading the manual, it appears the TurboFloppy was intended for Mac users
who didn't have floppy ports but needed a second 1.4MB-only floppy drive.
 I'm not sure who that would be. My plan is to use the drive as a quick-
and-dirty way of loading software (particularly network software) onto
Macs with bad floppy drives.

Tom

Applefritter
www.applefritter.com
Received on Tue May 29 2001 - 21:35:40 BST