20 Jan
2006
20 Jan
'06
10:19 a.m.
On 1/20/2006 at 11:31 AM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Although one thing I've found with many years
experience with PS/2's is
that 1.44MB drives in PS/2's reliably can treat 720kB floppies as 1.44MB
floppies without any trouble whatsoever. I mean, without covering the
hole or anything like that.
Indeed. While there is ostensibly a difference in coercivity in the media,
it's not as large as it is between 1.2MB and 360K media. I still might
even have a diskette punch to add the hole to 720K diskettes kicking
around. Should anyone be curious, I think I still have media
characteristics sent to me by 3M. Since the PS/2 used drives that were
"blind" to the added hole, swapping DS2D media for DSHD was very common.
We still see this a lot from customers with machine tools and lab equipment
requiring 720K media--since they're using 720K drives without the media
sensor, they routinely use DSHD media without bad effects. When we read
the disks, we either use a 720K drive or just cover over the hole
temporarily.
Cheers,
Chuck