Favorite Disk Drive

General discussions related to the Altair 8800 Clone

Favorite Disk Drive

Postby Wayne Parham » March 19th, 2022, 8:06 pm

Question to the group:

What's your favorite disk drive, and why?

I should probably qualify this question, as I am asking specifically about the disk drives that can be connected to Mike's FDC+ board for the Altair 8800c replica described on his DeRamp.com website.

And a semi-related question:

Anyone here connected a hard disk?

I was looking at options, and found a few controllers for hard disks and one that even connected to IDE drives and compact flash cards. Like this one:

Hard Disk / CF Card adapter

Anyone here have experience with that?
Wayne Parham
 
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Re: Favorite Disk Drive

Postby toml_12953 » March 19th, 2022, 10:53 pm

Wayne Parham wrote:Question to the group:

What's your favorite disk drive, and why?

I should probably qualify this question, as I am asking specifically about the disk drives that can be connected to Mike's FDC+ board for the Altair 8800c replica described on his DeRamp.com website.



I have two 5.25" HD TEAC floppy drives in an old Tandy FD-500 case as well as two Shugart SA800 8" drives in an old Epson case. I manually switch between them. For compatibility, I can't beat the Shugarts as I can read and write hard-sectored disks just fine. For everyday use, though, I use the Teacs since it's much easier and cheaper to get replacements for them if I wear them out. Media are also much easier to get in the 5.25" size.
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Re: Favorite Disk Drive

Postby Wayne Parham » March 20th, 2022, 9:51 am

Thanks for the tips!
Wayne Parham
 
Posts: 240
Joined: March 18th, 2022, 3:01 pm

Re: Favorite Disk Drive

Postby BillO » March 21st, 2022, 3:11 pm

Serial server - 8MB drives are just too useful to pass up on and a decent used PC is much cheaper than 8" floppies. It's like having two HDDs. I'm using a mini Acer Veriton with a 4th-gen i5 I got for nothing. Does the job very well and acts as a serial server for several other systems too.
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Re: Favorite Disk Drive

Postby Wayne Parham » March 27th, 2022, 10:14 am

Good suggestion, thanks!
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Joined: March 18th, 2022, 3:01 pm


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