Multiple floppies in one system?

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Wed Feb 27 15:17:17 2002

Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to get one of those multi-position
wafer switches that one sees in A/B/C/D switches for attaching multiple
computers to a single monitor/keyboard/mouse and attach one to each drive.
That way you can select the drive configuration you want for any two (which is
what the PC will support) of the 4 or 5 drives you have. There are other
approaches, but this one will produce predictable results, provided you study
out the configuration options in advance.

BTW, those 3-1/2"/5-1/4" comination drives look like two drives to the
controller. There's even an option jumper for selecting which drive is 'A'
and which is /'B.'

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "David C. Jenner" <djenner_at_earthlink.net>
To: "Classic Computer Mailing List" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 1:22 PM
Subject: Multiple floppies in one system?


> I'm putting together an old 486 system, one of whose main purposes will be
to
> read/write floppies of several formats. Like 5.25" 360K, 720K, 1.2M, RX50,
etc.,
> and 3.5" 720K and 1.44M. I also want to be able to copy RX50s disk to disk
on
> the appropriate drive type.
>
> So I figure it'll take 4 drives (or maybe 3 drives where one is a 3.5"/5.25"
> combo). All of these would be in one enclosure.
>
> The question is, how to do this without having to unplug/plug drives every
> time you want to make a configuration change? It would be nice to just be
> able to throw a switch or two to re-configure. Not having to get into the
> enclosure would be nice, too.
>
> I've thought of two ways to do it, but I'm not sure they'll work, or if
there
> might not be a better way.
>
> 1) Plug all the drives into one control cable and switch on/off the power
> to the drives to select them.
> 2) Plug all the drives into one control cable and select the drives by
> switching a control line on the control cable.
>
> Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave
> --
> David C. Jenner
> djenner_at_earthlink.net
>
>
Received on Wed Feb 27 2002 - 15:17:17 GMT