[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

[Dan Olson]

>>  The 3.5 floppies were 720K and 1.4M.
>
> Ah... not quite. "Normal" MFM 3.5" floppy drives are electrically similar to 
> their 5.25" counterparts, and can be used in all the configurations listed 
> above - that said, I don't believe there were any 35-track 3.5" drives made, 
> but there certainly were 40-track 3.5" drives available, and the TPDD (Tandy 
> Portable Disk Drive) for the Model 100/102/200 series (and Brother sewing 
> machines, believe it or not) were available in 100K and 200K versions as 
> well, but they only used FM encoding (single-density). Those were 40 & 80 
> track respectively; 2 sectors per track.

You're right, thought 99.99% of the time you won't see anything other than 
720k, 1.44M and 2.88M (can't forget that one).  Those 40 track drive do 
exist from what I'm told but are not common at all.  Also, there are a few 
single sided 3.5" drives floating around out there, aside from the Mac's 
propriatary stuff, the Atari ST used single sided drives very earily on.

> There's also been 2.8" & 3.0" micro-diskette sizes, and don't even get me 
> started on the 8" drives... Altho I have a box of those, I've never had a 
> computer that uses them.

I (sorta) recently got a TRS-80 Model II and now have to figure out how 
I'm going to make a few 8" disks.  I bought a bunch of hard sectored disks 
thinking they'd be worth something the the right person, unfortunatly, the 
right person isn't exactly easy to find! :)  I suppose I'll have to buy a 
couple disks for it at some point, though in the end I'm going to use a 
couple external 1.2M 5.25" drives...got a ton of those disks!

 	Dan