Five and quarter drives

Tony Duell ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk
Fri Feb 11 17:55:05 CST 2005


> > Can someone refresh my memory please whether it was possible to visually
> > tell 360K and 1.2MB 5 1/4 inch floppy drives apart (the drive that is,
> > not the media).
> 
> Unless I'm quite mistaken, the 1.2M drives have two r/w heads - one 
> for each side of the media, whereas the 360K have only one. > -- 

You are mistaken, at least for normal PC drives. The 360K one is a 40 
cylinder double-head device. It's possible to make a single-head 360K 
drive -- it would have 80 cylinders. In fact the DEC RX50 is one such, 
but those drives are not common on PCs

-tony



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