[Coco] Need new disk drive...

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Michael Robinson wrote:
> My 360k drives are faulty.  I looked on ebay, all I could find were DSDD
> drives.  I can't use DSDD drives can I?  

Depends, DSDD i Double sided, Double density, so they should be able to 
be used cirtainly with a standard RS or Dragon dos controler. What may 
be an issue is if they are 80 track drives and your disks are 40 track 
(as I would expect if they are 360K), as the standard doeses have no 
facility for double stepping.

>					My controller says hard drive
> specialists on it, it only controls disk drives. 

Humm not heard of that one :)

>						 Two of the drives
> looked a lot like the ones I have, full height black with red led.

Sounds like the original IBM PC drives, and a little like Apple 2 drives 
which are defo not compatible (The Apple drives that is).

> None of the drives come with an external enclosure or a coco compatible
> floppy cable.  The cable I need has to be non keyed on the controller
> end.  I think one of my drives came out of a model III and the other
> is a TRS80 mini disk.

Something else to considder, unless you have a whole bunch of 5.25" 
disks, is that it's perfectly possible to use standard PC 1.44M 3.5" 
drives with the correct cable, as long as you always use 720K media.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.