28 Jan
1998
28 Jan
'98
10:21 a.m.
At 07:54 PM 1/28/98 +0000, you wrote:
You could
actually get four, supported by the motherboard switches. ($529
each, IIRC) There was some sort of expansion box, or you could get external
drives. I presume that's what the connector on the back of the FDD
controller was for.
Even if you mounted the external drives in the 5161 expansion box, you
used the DC37 connector on the floppy controller. You didn't use a second
controller card for the extra drives.
You link this connector using a 34 wire cable with a 'PC twist'. Pins
1,2,20 on the connector are not used, then pin 3 becomes wire 1 of the
cable, etc. An IDC connector works fine,
My XT has 2 360K drives (IBM-badged) internally, and 2 720K drives hung
off this connector.
-tony
There were aftermarket controllers made that had the external connector
and supported 720K, 1.44 or even 1.2 Mb drives. FWIW I bought an early
NEC laptop. It had a connector on that could be connected to the external
floppy port and a ROM resident that turned off the CPU and memory and let
you use the two internal 720K drives as external drives from a PC.
Joe
Joe