Dual slim external floppy drive!

[cjcliffe]

I found this on e-bait and couldn't turn it down; seemed to have been overlooked by others so I managed to grab it - one of the drive covers was cracked and didn't hold in place but no worries as my A4000 appears to be the only other one that even has a drive flap anyways

I tried it out by booting my A500 that has a finicky internal drive and noticed that only the top unit appeared to be working.. Time to open it up

What I found was a nice slim pair of HD floppy drives! A bit more looking revealed the reason the second drive didn't work:

It would appear it had a separate power supply that connected to an external power jack.. After a bit of searching I found that many folks had no problem running 2 external floppies powered from the disk port so I made a quick Y-adapter and tied it onto the existing power leads:

Back to the A500 and I was able to boot from one and run software from the other no problem -- bonus is that they're extremely quiet and seem to be fairly quick.

No more swapping back and forth for running software that needs workbench libs or during copying

One issue I was having (and I'll probably reference this post in the AmiOracle section) is that it only appears to be recognized as a pair of 880k on any of my machines, yet googling for "FD1138H" reveals them to be HD drives...

I've seen mention of a similar drive elsewhere (not the slim model) that required a driver to enable HD mode so I'm wondering if perhaps I need the same for this unit?

Thanks for taking a look


Update: AmiOracle thread with additional discussion is here: https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?p=255987

 

[mjnurney]

Nice find , I like it


My old hd drive from power computing used a driver disk - try that ?

Take a look on the Amiga hardware website and try a few driver disks (adf)

Mike.

 

[cjcliffe]

Aha! I knew I recognized that little dude with the lighting bolt logo on a tiny sticker on the back of it but couldn't put a name to it:

Found what looks to be an older model with almost identical features but not HD:

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=783

Now I at least know what I'm looking for, thanks!

 

[mjnurney]

hope it works okay

 

[johnim]

nice find mate

 

[ChrisUnionNJ]

That looks like A real nice find!!

 

[chiark]

I think a lot of manufacturers at the time used HD drives because they were cheap.

When a normal HD drive is sending data, it does so at twice the rate of standard density. The Amiga cannot cope with this, so an Amiga HD drive needs to halve its rotation speed to keep the data rate the same as SD data rate.

One way of telling if it's really HD enabled is to put a PC format HD disk in and listen. You'll get the seeking and clunking of heads in a characteristic "I don't know what this is that you're feeding me" noise, but it'll be half as fast as if you put it in the internal drive.

As well as having a half speed drive, you'll need a patch to use it - I've got the Power Computing patch if you need it.

My assumption is that they're just acting as SD drives on the Amiga, but you might be lucky...

EDIT: just had a search. The rotation rate is always 300RPM. An Amiga HD drive needs to drop that to 150RPM
No mntion of that on: http://support.necam.com/oem/fdd/FD1138h.asp