Floppy drive oddity? (TEC FB-503) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

23 Jun 2004

Hi tony,

...
   I thought that
perhaps they were 80 track drives or some such, 
Are there any letters after the FD-503 part of the number? In general 
Teac suffixes tell you the number of heads and cylinders. 
Is TEC (Tokyo Electric Company) TEAC?
No extra letters - I'm pretty sure they are standard 40 track drives,
but I have not been able to dig up any hard info so far.

...
   Does anyone
know anything about these drives? Are they 80 track
 or otherwise "odd"?  Are they known to have a high failure rate
 (especially with age)?  Any info would be appreciated. 
Does the disk rotate? Does the head seek to cylinder 0 at power on? Have 
you tried looking at the ReadData line on the interface connector with a 
'scope or logic analyser? 
Drives spin and seek - everything looks normal except that they reseek
a couple of times and then report an error - haven't scoped the read data
yet (this weekend).

Regards,
Dave
-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Vintage computing equipment collector.
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