CompuServe Thread

The big problem is that the Amiga is designed to put out data onto floppy at 1 Mhz. A 2 Mhz clock is required for high density drives. Thus, the only way to add one is to put a drive on that slows the rate which the disk spins to half normal speed. One of the problems with this technique is that the ability of a stock motor (i.e. it's torque) is much less and the control logic has a difficult time maintaining an exact speed. Drag variations within different floppy manufacturers cause some disk to work and others to not to. The AE drives are slightly faster than half, thus cannot write MS-DOS high density diskettes. At least that's what I have heard. The true solution would be to extend the custom chipset to write data at 2X the current speed; IF it were modified, then a 4X clock option would be better to write for 2.8 Meg drivers, etc. Setting the number of sectors to a number larger than allowed will cause the disk to be written more than one full track. Obviously if the filesystem you are using even accepted that, you wouldn't be able to read back what you read and would be constantly losing data. -Greg

Marcel: While not a 3.5 drive, and perhaps not what you had in mind, the following is the bulk of a post I'm making to the classified section later tonight, perhaps this might help you some. I have some Konica KT510 10 meg floppy drives for sale. These drives will work with many Amiga SCSI controllers and will allow you to read and write to a specially formatted 5.25" floppy disk up to 10 megs of data. These drives can also read 1.2 meg IBM formatted disks as well as 360k IBM formatted disks by using CrossDOS using a single mountlist entry! As far as I know this is the only drive that allows reading the 1.2 meg IBM format directly on an Amiga (the AT Bridgeboard doesn't count). The major limitation of these drives is that for some reason they won't work with GVP controllers, although this is being looked into, and there may be a work around for this. I've personally tested these drives with the MicroBotics HardFrame, Supra's Wordsync controller, the A2091, And the A3000's SCSI port. ICD says that the drive should work on their controller. It should work with most any SCSI controller that doesn't depend upon anything special with the SCSI-II specification. The price for the bare drive (no case or power supply) is $200.00. Media (disks) for the drive are available either in bulk from Konica, or individually from me, call or Email for more info. If you're interested, you may leave me Email here, or call me at my office 8AM-4PM Eastern time @ 1-800-327-9420 or you may call me after these hours @ 305-733-6204 or 6205. Email to SCHILLER on GEnie or BIX, 76416,3065 on CompuServe or uflorida!novavax!agrijag!mike on UUCP/Usenet -Mike Schiller In sunny Fort Lauderdale