4 floppy disk drives on a PC?

From: Doc Shipley <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Sun Jan 16 15:14:50 2005

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
>
>
>>The original IBM-PC's floppy controller made provisions for four floppy
>>drives. There are control lines to select up to four drives on the
>>single interface. They put a 37-pin D-shape connector on the bracket of
>>early IBM floppy controller cards so you could plug in an expansion case
>>with two external floppy drives.
>>
>>I only did this once, as an experiment, to see if I could run my old
>>WWIV BBS on floppy-drives only, to reduce the noise of the machine. (It
>>worked, but was much slower.)
>>
>>I'm pretty sure the 'fix' isn't to plug in an old IBM controller,
>>though, unless you're already talking about a vintage restoration
>>project. But the third and fourth select lines should be available on
>>some controllers.
>
>
> I'd like to make a box with four floppy types: 5.25" 360 and 1.2, and
> 3.5" 720 and 1.44. I seem to recall someone here did this.

   Unless you need to be able to have 2 disks of the same size active at
the same time, you don't need four drives.

   I have a 5.25/3.5" combo drive that handles all four of those formats
(and 3.5" 360K) just fine. The gorgeous part is that it occupies a
single 5.25" bay.

   You have to be careful with the newer x86 motherboards, though - a
lot of them will only configure a single floppy at the BIOS level. I
don't imagine that's a big deal in this crowd though. ;)


        Doc
Received on Sun Jan 16 2005 - 15:14:50 GMT