PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Pete Turnbull]

On Oct 11 2005, 12:03, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Chuck Guzis wrote:
> > On 10/11/2005 at 9:24 AM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> >
> >>How about SCSI floppy drives?
> >
> > The problem with SCSI floppies is essentially the same--addressing
is on a sector number basis, not CHS.  So the drives have limited
format recognition capabilities.  I've never seen a 5.25' SCSI floppy

I have a couple, from SGI equipment IIRC.  They're basically a standard
floppy with a bridge board fitted, and so are 3.5" TEAC floppies from
SGI workstations.  The Insite flopticals, though, are made as a native
SCSI device.

> But a DECstation 2100/3100 comes with a floppy drive hooked to a
board
> with a 34-pin floppy header, and then the SCSI bus from the
motherboard
> plugs into the translator board.  Could something like this be used?

Up to a point.  You can certainly put either a 5.25" or a 3.5" drive on
those boards, but as far as I remember, they still only recognise
fairly standard (read "IBM PC/MS-DOS style") formats -- certainly
that's true of the floptical and SGI devices.  Anything with sector
numbers starting at zero is hard to handle, for example.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York