Floppy disc reader/writer status report

Philip Pemberton wrote: I believe that's right; the 801 is the hard-sectored version. The 850 is a double-sided version of the 800, and the 851 is a double-sided version of the 801. The 85x docs talk about MFM data though, whereas I don't think that the 80x docs do. I'm not sure if there's any good technical reason that the 80x drives can't handle an MFM data stream, though. (I think there might be some on-board "helper" circuitry for separating FM clock/data bits on at least some of the 80x flavours - but I think this can be jumpered out so that the controller does the stream encoding/decoding instead). Aren't hard-sectored 8" floppies available in more than just 32 sectors/track flavours? It's no big deal if your circuitry is analysing timing relationships to detect index pulse, but it obviously is if the circuitry's relying on timing windows as the timing will be different for a 32-sector disk versus one with n sectors... (I've only got the SA400 manual here, but the index/sector detection circuitry uses different timing depending on the media used - I presume because 5.25" hard sectored media was also available with different numbers of sectors per track) cheers Jules -- "What progress. It's almost as good as taping it... on tapes which self destruct in seven days." - Bill Bailey on the BBC's "watch again" service