Apple Floppy Drives (was: More Apple Pimpers)

General comment, Most 8" systems were expected be and behaved reliably and have at least 250k of space. Most 5.25" systems could be reliable but, often weren't. I'll restrict comments to 5.25" for the later reason. Most of the complaints I've had with disk systems be they Apple or not were often in this order. 1- Drives (SA400 was pure garbage!!!) 2- horribly botched controllers (TRS-80 without mods) 3- software such as disk drivers that would hang if no media or errors 4- floppy drives/controlers that would "bite" the media on power up or down. meaning it would write trash due to no write locks. 5- not enough space The apple-II was plagued with #1 and somewhat with #3 depending on OS and definately #4. Space was a problem for many users(#5) Trash-80 was 1 through 5 example. NS* mostly #4 had to be watched if the drives were seperately powered and earlier units were SA400 (#1 problem). The SD controller while bullet proof was space poor at 90k per drive (#5). CCS used 8" disks and reliable controller. It was however prone to #4. Many S100 system that used 8" drives and the better 5.25 drives fell in this realm of reliability though most with 5.25 were pretty cramped until 360k(DD) or 720->780k(QD aka two sided DD) formats were common. Of the most reliable my AmproLB+, Kaypro 4/84 with Advent turborom,NS* (both SD and DD) and most of the post 1981 systems in the commercial systems space. My expectations of reliable were set by minicomputers long before micros I'd worked with where if the disk didn't work it was something I did wrong. Of all, my opinion is that floppies were ok but the first real improvement was the 3.5" drives(720k and 1.44m generation) with the power fail logic on board. They offered good storage, small size, lower power, good reliability and quieter than the whole lot. Allison