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

[Rogelio Perea]

On Sun 1 Feb 2004 - "John Guin" wrote:

> 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?

I have modified two different CoCo Disk systems to work with the "single drive" power supply they came with. First system is a 26-3029 (catalog number of the disk controller, pre FD-500 designation days). This 3029 disk system came with a single full height drive, I put two half-height drives in there and soldered a new two drive power cable harness in there, never had a problem with the unit overheating.

The second system is an FD-502. This was bought with one half height drive installed and had a plastic bezel that resembled a drive cover. The user manuam of the FD-502 had instructions to upgrade the system to a two drive setup, and according to it you had to install a fan (which came with the second drive kit) that prevented the power supply from overheating; the supply had already the two drive wire installed. When I installed the second drive (non Tandy) I never had a problem with the stock power supply, no overloads, no overheating, and I used that setup daily and mainly with OS9, which exercises the drives pretty much.

Let us know the model of your disk system. As noted above, with two different setups I had no problem splitting the power supply to handle two half height drives. My guess is that the newer drives consume much less power than the ones Tandy had in mind when it produced the disk systems for the CoCo, so you can get away with projects like this.


-=[ Rogelio ]=-
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