[Coco] Any problem with connecting 2 floppies to one power supply?

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 18:52, John Guin wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>I have a singel floppy drive system for my coco I bought back in the
> 80s.  I have a second 5 1/4" drive to add to it and it fits inside
> the case, and I have a cable which allows two floppies.  The power
> supply is the problem - it only has one connector.  Is it possible
> to add a splitter which would power both drives?  Does the coco
> ever access both at the same time, and if not, can anyone see any
> problems with connecting 2 floppies to the single power supply?
>
>Thanks,
>John Guin

John, that would depend on whether you are running the stock coco 
drive cabling and rsbasic only, or useing a full cable set and os9.  
Os9 startes all drive motors at the same time whereas the shacks 
lashup with the missing teeth cabling only ran the motors in the 
drive being accessed.  So there is a possibility that running os9 
will either overload the supply, or overheat its very limited heat 
sinking.

That said, I did it for several years in my grass valley e-disk 
simulation running on os9, but its duty cycle was quite low.  Never 
had a problem with it, ever, other than dying wd-1773's in the disk 
controllers, it used up 3 of them in 13 years.  I think the purple 
plague ate them, a well known PMOS chip failure mechanism.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.