--- On Wed, 8/11/10, Iamanamma <[email protected]> wrote:
> Anyway, since everyone who has posted here knows a lot more
> than I do
> about the floppy drives: Were there any real changes
> in them throughout the years?
Three major variants. The original 400K single sided, which was later converted
to 800K double sided. Then came the 1.44 "Super Drive".
All of those were power inject and eject and didn't have a dust flap on the
disk slot. The auto inject 1.44M drives have a plastic dust cover that mainly
serves to keep every bit of dust and fluff that comes in through the disk slot
inside the drive. Since the seal isn't perfect, some air still gets sucked
through, pulling crud with it. I remove those so dust will suck *through* the
drive.
The third version is also 1.44M but only has power eject. The disks have to be
pushed in almost all the way to where they snap in, just like a PC type drive.
They do have a dust flap, but most of the case slots don't match up to the flap
shape at all so there's still lots of space for air and dirt to come in, but
they're much more open so it's easier for the dust to go on through.
All of the drives are interface compatible, but the 400/800K drives won't
physically fit later Macs, and later Mac OS versions dropped some support for
the old formats. Also, the Plus and older have no support for the 1.44M format
except via a 3rd party external drive.
The SE and Mac II need a ROM upgrade and replacing the IWM chip with a SWIM
chip to use 1.44M drives. (The Mac II also benefits from bug fixes that allow
larger SIMMs in Bank A to match the capability of Bank B.) The SE FD/HD (Floppy
Drive High Density) was a SE with the ROM and SWIM factory upgraded and a 1.44M
drive.
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