1.44 MB floppys used in 880K Amiga Disk Drives

[barney]

I have always been told that you can not use a 1.44 mb floppy in a standard Amiga drive.  Well, I decided to put this theory to the test. I formatted a regular everyday 1.44 floppy and guess what?  It worked absolutely fine!  I now use these disks all the time to play games, save data, etc.

Whoevey else out there that heard the same, give it a try.  You will never have to worry again about scrambling for DS DD disks anymore.  Good luck

Barney

hehe. no plastic tape over the hole on the side marked HD or anything? I've been wasting tape!

[barney]

I don't even use tape.  I will keep the tape idea in mind in case I run into any troubles in the future.

Barney

[countzero]

AFAIK, the problem with the HD disks is the medium is different from DD disks and requires much more power to magnetise. This will eventually put a stress on your amiga floppy drive and one day kill it.

[rkauer]

 Those HD diskette have a prone to fail due they different magnetic surface.

 In every disk box I buy, I usually only take 5~6 for Amiga stuff. :angry:

 BTW: the original Amiga floppy unit is DD, so putting an HD disk inside doesn't matter. It will only be formatted in 880k.

countzero - is this true only when writing to the disks, or when reading from them as well?

[stefcep2]

i found that over a short time these disks fail even if you tape the hole up.

[barney]

Countzero, does the Amiga floppy really have the technology of saying "ok.... I am not successfully magnetizing this disk so I better up my power to see if that works".  I could be wrong, but if the drive does not have the necessary power to magnetize the disk in the first place, then the disk simply would not work (unreadable).  Who knows, maybe I am wrong.  Maybe the Amiga floppy can up it's power...who knows.  I have not had any problems yet, but I will keep an eye on it.

[weirdami]

The tape thing doesn't do a thing because DD drives don't have a sensor on that side. I remember tape on 5 1/4" floppies making them write-protected, and doing tape on the other side protected the back side of the disk in the same way. One thing you could try is drilling a hole in a DD disk and seeing if it will work in an HD drive. I remember people trying that a long time ago. Dunno what the results were.

[Ilwrath]

Countzero, does the Amiga floppy really have the technology of saying "ok.... I am not successfully magnetizing this disk so I better up my power to see if that works".

Nope.... I don't think you'll have that happen either.  But, you'll get a lot more random track and sector errors.  And you'll get a much shorter lifespan for the data.  I used some HD disks on Amiga maybe 10 years ago.  Almost all of those disks were unreadable within a year or two.  Where as the DS/DD disks from 15+ years ago (stored in the same boxes) STILL have 90% or more readable.

Also, you only need the tape on a DS/DD disk to read it on a High Density drive.  (If a high density drive detects the hole in the disk, it will try to read it as high density, and will not retry to read it as a low density after the high density read fails.)

[orange]

@rkauer, @weirdami

thats not true, at least some DD drives do have HD sensor. I know my A500 original drive has it.

the problem is that such diskettes are not reliable, in a few hours or days they might become unreadable.

[rkauer]

orange wrote:
@rkauer, @weirdami

thats not true, at least some DD drives do have HD sensor. I know my A500 original drive has it.

the problem is that such diskettes are not reliable, in a few hours or days they might become unreadable.

 I know they have. But the switch is useless on Amiga units (but the rare HD ones).

 I agree with using HD disks on Amiga is a no-no. Since HD disks needs a stronger magnetic field to properly store data, the DD unit can't cope with it and the disk will lost the magnetic data stored in an unpredictable time. :angry:

[weirdami]

@orange

That's a useless bit of technology.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Haven't had any problems with it so far :-?
(and believe me, I've done it alot)

I'm still curious about the above statement that the use of HD disks will damage the DD drive in an Amiga. Personally, I do not care if my floppies all die 3 seconds after I take them out of the drive - to me they are only for moving files from my PC to the Amiga, so if they become useless after accomplishing that, it's ok. However, if the heads in my drive are going to be damaged, that's another story. I have never heard of this problem before; has anyone here actually damaged a drive this way?