9 Dec
2004
9 Dec
'04
10:40 p.m.
Tom Jennings wrote:
So what's the story with 8" DSDD floppy drives
these days? Are
they still available at all? I may need one for my old CP/M-80
machine; some meeces made a nice house and toilet in one. B: is
now a single-sided drive, good enough for now, but not later,
as the spindle bearing is VERY NOISY (always was). There may
be a spare DSDD drive in a box of junk and/or I may recover
the one that went weewee.
Jerome Fine replies:
DSD (Data System Design) made a DSD 880/30 box
which emulated a DEC RX02. However, the drive
was actually able to handle DSDD 8" floppy media,
so I suspect that it might be able to do what
you need. While there used to be a fair demand
for these drives, I doubt that there still is.
As for the actual media, while SSDD 8" floppy
media had an index hole in a different location,
I became tired of having to punch the extra pair
of holes to allow single sided media to be used
as double sided. I placed a DPDT switch in the
detector circuit and it allowed SSDD media to be
used as DSDD media (after a LLF of course). What
I found curious was that of the dozen or so different
brands of 8" floppy media that I used, I had zero
failures on the second side when they were converted
from SSDD to DSDD - EXCEPT for one brand from DEC
which had originally carried some distributions.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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