[Coco] 5 1/4" drive

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 07 April 2009, J.P. Samson wrote:
>On Apr 7, 2009, at 9:14 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Tuesday 07 April 2009, Bill wrote:
>>> Refresh my memory, please. Can an 80 track 1.2M 5 1/4" drive be
>>> installed
>>> into an FD-502 case and work correctly? Will it act like a
>>> "standard" floppy
>>> drive using the stock chip in the controller?
>>
>> Yes and no.  If you can locate the jumper on the drive that slows
>> the disk
>> from the 360 rpm the 1.2meg disk spins, to the 300 rpm that all
>> other disk
>> formats spins, then they can, under os9/nitros9 only, be used for
>> 720k drives.
>> I have been doing so for many years.
>
>What do you use for disks in this scenario?  I would think you'd need
>5-1/4" DSQD (double-sided, quad-density) floppies to ensure
>reliability.  These are ultra-rare (I only have a single 10-pack of
>them in my collection).
>
>-- JP
>
For the 250 kilobaud use, any disk seems to be ok.  I ran a pair of teac full 
height 720k disk drives that way for years (until I wore out the heads that 
is) that could be told to use more than 80 tracks, all would reach the 83rd, 
one could do the 84th too.  So I had some 765k disks, and may still have them 
someplace.  There is no diff in the media that changing the tpi needs, the 
harder DSQD media will also work as I have a couple boxes of those too, but 
they didn't appear to be a requirement.

>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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