3-1/2" Floppy Market Cornered

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Thu May 22 15:48:01 2003

On Thu, 22 May 2003, Tony Duell wrote:
> > No, but "DD" drives initially, for obvious reasons, did not have a switch.
> True DD drives probably still don't :-).
> Incidentally, the Sony drive used in the HP9114 that started this
> discussion does have a switch that lines up with the HD-hole. It's used
> to detect that a disk has been inserted, and therefore, these drives
> don't even recognise an HD disk (they think the drive is empty)

Hmmm. So "wrong disk" is equated to "no disk".
Did they PLAN it that way to reject the other disks that were being
planned for, (I assume that they knew about the future diskette types
before we did), or did they just get lucky?

> > And, I can easily show you "HD" drives that do not have a switch! IBM did
> > not put a switch in their original "1.44" drives in PS/2's. Some users of
> How did they work? Did they use the HD write current for all disks? Or
> did they use the density select line from the controller, like the 5.25"
> 1.2M drives do? I would hope the latter.

Yes. The "density" was software controlled. You could still format a
"720K" by using /T:80 /N:9, or /F:2, or later /F:720.
NOTE: XP has discontinued F:2 and F:720, but /T:80 /N:9 still works.

> > At no point has the price differential been so extreme as to justify using
> > the wrong diskette on a regular basis. Admittedly, there can be
> FWIW, the street price in the UK at the moment is at least a factor of 2
> (with the DD being double the price of the HD). This still has not
> convinced me to risk my data :-)

Different people place different values on their data.

...and now that AOHell sends out CD's, we will all have to BUY our
diskettes.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred        cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Thu May 22 2003 - 15:48:01 BST

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