[Coco] help with bare 5.25 drive

[Frank Swygert]

Whether you need a fan or not depends on which enclosure you have. That last one Tandy made has a marginal power supply when used with two drives, and it NEEDS a fan. Any made before that will usually work just fine without a fan unless you're doing lots of intensive disk I/O that works BOTH drives a lot (like running a BBS or continuous back-ups from one disk to another). Of course if you have one of the old grey (or white) cases with the power transformer sticking out the back you could probably power three half-high drives without heat issues! Those were originally made for power hungry full height drives. 

The cable connectors can be an irritant. The Tandy cable is short between the two drives. It was made for drives that have the edge card connector directly across from each other. There is no standard location for the connector. Some have it to one side or the other, some centered in the back. It's not too difficult to remove the connector and move it a little further down the cable, or just crimp another connector on and fold the cable up inside... or even make a custom cable. 

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Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 00:16:22 -0500
From: Sean <badfrog at gmail.com>

I had two separate dual drive cases, both with two mismatched drives
and no fan, and both worked great for 10 years.  Maybe I was lucky
with the cables lining up.


On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Neil <neilsmorr at gmail.com> wrote:

> > First, you have to add a fan inside for two drives.
> > Second, ideally you need two identical drives as it is hard to get the cable to fit two odd drives.
-- 
Frank Swygert
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