Re: MFM drive gone nuts

As I said elsewhere, with hard drives you had both options:

If you didn't mind fiddling with jumpers when you replaced or swapped drives 
then you could use a straight-through cable and set the drive ID with the DS 
jumper(s).

If you preferred all your drives' jumpers to be set identically then you 
could use a 'twisted' cable (but as noted, not the same as a twisted floppy 
cable) and the drive ID would be determined by its position, just like a 
modern IDE drive used with a 'non-standard' 80 connector cable with selected 
pins missing from the connectors.

What was 'shockingly non-standard' about PC floppy drives? Assuming they had 
not been tampered with and were the appropriate capacity (single vs. 
double-sided, double vs. high density, no. of tracks) they were totally 
interchangeable; unplug the old and plug in the new, with no need to fuss 
with jumpers or switches.

Contrast this with Commodore's IEEE drives, where an 8050 could contain any 
of four incompatible drives despite all being the same format and capacity.

m

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "smf" <smf@null.net>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 4:16 PM
Subject: Re: MFM drive gone nuts


> >No, it had a twist but not like the one in a PC floppy cable.
>
> Strange, it appears it's something to do with activity led's. Google finds 
> people who say theirs doesn't have a twist, so maybe it came later after 
> they started fitting a different type of drive.
>
> floppy drives were shockingly non-standard.
>
>
>       Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list 


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