On 05/08/2016 02:33 PM, Philip Pemberton wrote: > My awards list more or less goes as follows: > > Hardest to align: Nintendo Famicom Disk System. For bonus points, > when you replace the drive belt, you have to realign the drive hub, > which sets the "start of track" position. There must be a jig or > procedure to do this, but I've never seen it. Homebrew procedure is > to loosen the hub and rotate it a few degrees until things align and > the drive works... The hub alignment, incidentally, is critical > because the discs are written as a continuous spiral track, not a > series of concentric tracks.
Used on the Smith-Corona PWPs as well. Sad part is that the old belt turns to goo and is hard to clean and get running again. There is/was a seller on eBay who was offering polyurethane replacements. I've got a pile of those sitting in my freezer. > Nicest half-height 5.25in: Teac FD-550 series I love these drives to > bits. There are a bunch of variants (40/80 track, 1.2Meg and 360K) > but they're pretty solid performers. Fairly good at reading crusty > old disks. Keep a few Bemcot wipes and some isopropyl around to clean > the heads. I think you mean FD-55 series. Shame that they never made any 100 tpi varieties, but Teac did rebadge someone else's FH 100 tpi drive. > Weirdest drive interface: the NEC 8-inch drive Uses something called > a "VFO" interface (I think I remembered that right?), which is a > Japanese standard. Also needs to be rejumpered to provide raw data > output. This is jolly good fun, because the jumpers (if memory > serves) have quite odd labels... You can find old PC98-era Japanese stuff (along with some CNC gear) that requires these. Getting the gear going with a commodity legacy drive is a real chore--there used to be a manufacturer of external PLL data separator boards to accomplish this. > The "What were they thinking?!" award: Amstrad 3-incher, made by > Panasonic. PC style power connector pinout. With the 5V and 12V > swapped. You can bet every one of these you'll find that's been > "tested working, motor spins when powered but that's normal" will > have a fried ASIC. Again, has a drive belt, but at least you can > replace this without cocking up the alignment. I've done in a 3.5" drive on a Joyce by thinking that nobody would be so stupid as to swap the +5 and +12 on the same connector. Yes, it fried the drive. Also, the interface cable requires some serious 'reweaving' to interface to a traditional (Shugart-style) interface. > For 3.5in PC drives, I quite like the Sony drives. From experience > with DiscFerret, they're pretty good at pulling a clean signal off > discs some other drives won't even read. Some Panasonic drives are > better built, though. Apples and oranges. I've lately taken up with Samsung SFD-321B drives for general use. Well-made and very flexible. I occasionally provide drives to the CNC people where pin 34 is READY/ and pin 2 is DISK CHANGED/ with DS0 and 1.6MB (360 RPM) mode. All easily done with the Sammies. --------- On a related note of "weird and wonderful", does anyone have media for the Western Digital "Take Ten" cartridge drive? --Chuck
