Amiga 500 - Floppy disk drive curiosity

[CA-Bay]

Hello everyone,

I have two A500s and I noticed a difference in the behaviour of the drive LED.

In the first machine the LED lits up when the drive motor start turning and goes off when the motor stops.

The second computer turns on the drive LED only when the drive actually access to the disk, not when the motor start moving. So you have to ear carefully to it if you don't want to remove the disk while the motor is still rotating.

I know, it is not an issue 'cause the important thing is that the drive is not accessing the disk while you're removing it but anyway this thing is something annoying to me.

Anybody know if this behaviour is due to a specific model of the drive o if it is due to a settings on the drive board or on the A500 board?

If you got any information about this curiosity, please let me know. Thank you.



Cheers.

 

[mark1968]

I know the pin out of the internal drive connector has a motor 0 and read data lines, sounds like the LED may be connected to different lines or the internals of the different drives , one has a resister across motor and read so only lights up if both are high.

 

[CA-Bay]

Looking at the schematics of several A500 motherboards revisions, it seems impossible that this could happen because the signal that power up the drive motor is the same that lid up the LED. I suspect there's something different inside the drive controller board.