Apple Floppy Drives (was: More Apple Pimpers)

From: Allison <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Wed Nov 7 11:27:55 2001

General comment,

Most 8" systems were expected be and behaved reliably and have
at least 250k of space.

Most 5.25" systems could be reliable but, often weren't. I'll restrict
comments to 5.25" for the later reason.

Most of the complaints I've had with disk systems be they Apple or not
were often in this order.

    1- Drives (SA400 was pure garbage!!!)
    2- horribly botched controllers (TRS-80 without mods)
    3- software such as disk drivers that would hang if no media or errors
    4- floppy drives/controlers that would "bite" the media on power up or
down.
        meaning it would write trash due to no write locks.
    5- not enough space

The apple-II was plagued with #1 and somewhat with #3 depending on
OS and definately #4. Space was a problem for many users(#5)

Trash-80 was 1 through 5 example.

NS* mostly #4 had to be watched if the drives were seperately powered and
earlier units were SA400 (#1 problem). The SD controller while bullet proof
was
space poor at 90k per drive (#5).

CCS used 8" disks and reliable controller. It was however prone to #4.
Many S100 system that used 8" drives and the better 5.25 drives fell
in this realm of reliability though most with 5.25 were pretty cramped
until 360k(DD) or 720->780k(QD aka two sided DD) formats were common.

Of the most reliable my AmproLB+, Kaypro 4/84 with Advent turborom,NS*
(both SD and DD) and most of the post 1981 systems in the commercial
systems space. My expectations of reliable were set by minicomputers
long before micros I'd worked with where if the disk didn't work it was
something I did wrong.

Of all, my opinion is that floppies were ok but the first real improvement
was the 3.5" drives(720k and 1.44m generation) with the power fail logic
on board. They offered good storage, small size, lower power, good
reliability
and quieter than the whole lot.

Allison
Received on Wed Nov 07 2001 - 11:27:55 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:34:14 BST