9 Oct
2007
9 Oct
'07
4:41 a.m.
So, I'm faced with a bunch of 360k floppy drives. One of them I will put
in my main desktop machine for replicating floppies for, say, my C64,
Kaypro, etc. What should I look for when choosing such a drive? The best
specimen I have right now was taken from a Morrow Micro-Decision.
According to the tag, it's a "TEC FB-503". Can someone tell me something
about this?
I've had "not the greatest" luck with TEC drives. Out of the 4-5 I've
come across in recent years, I've had two failures. In both cases the
drive simply can no longer read - schematics and technical info. have
been non-existant. (btw, one was from a Micro-Decision, the other was
a single-sided variant of the same drive from a Nabu cable computer).
[Really annoying thing about the TEC/Nabu - the TEC drives have the
data connector on the opposite side from "most everyone else", and
the Nabu drive enclosure uses a circuit board behind the drive with
really short (ie: 2 inches) data cables - impossible to use another
drive without modification]
I've had excellent results with TEAC FD-55B for 360k drives. The
Panasonic drives have worked well for me also.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html