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Author Topic: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?  (Read 2501 times)

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Offline Oli_hdTopic starter

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Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« on: October 09, 2007, 06:55:39 PM »
Hi,
I hope someone is able to help, a guy was clearing out his house and found an A500 user manual and this floppy drive which he claims is an Amiga floppy drive.. its even by Power Computing, a well known UK Amiga company who did floppy drives .. but its got two 25 pin D-Sub connectors.

So is it an Amiga drive? Anyone have one?
Any info would be great as I would love a 5 1/4" floppy drive on my a4K :D

Here are a few pics:




Inside its got a small circuit board with the two 25 pin connectors basically wired together, two logic chips (a 4040 and something else) and two connections for the two floppy drives.
The drives are a 720kb (100% Amiga compatible) NEC drive and a 1.2Meg 5.25 drive.
there is also a transformer, diodes, capacitors, regulators etc to power the two drives.

The floppy signals seem to just connect to the interface which makes me think parallel but why have a pass-through which I cant see working on parallel...

come on guys, show your wisdom  :-D
 

Offline Oli_hdTopic starter

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Re: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« Reply #1 on: October 09, 2007, 07:05:55 PM »
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Weren't Amiga external floppy drives 25 pin?

Nope Motorollin, they are 23pin female at the computer.

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Maybe one port is for a cable to connect it to another Amiga, and the other is the passthrough which allowed you to daisy chain another external floppy drive.

I did think maybe they couldnt get 23pin pcb mount connectors so used 25 and had a lead with a 23 pin plug one end and a 25 pin plug the other... but that wouldnt be very cost effective.

It is an option though, I could make up a cable and try.. see if I get smoke or not. :)
 

Offline Oli_hdTopic starter

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Re: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« Reply #2 on: October 09, 2007, 07:50:34 PM »
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I had a drive that looked like this one years ago for my tandy laptop.

I would say this weighed about five kilos, god help you if you had this on a laptop :)
 

Offline Oli_hdTopic starter

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Re: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« Reply #3 on: October 09, 2007, 11:14:45 PM »
Hi guys, thanks for all the replies! :D

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Anyhoo, could quite possibly be a PC drive. Though you'd expect in that case to see some buffers and a PC floppy controller chip in there somewhere.

Nope, no buffers or floppy controller on the board, just a 74hc74 and the 4040.

Heres a last ditch effort, three more photos:

Power computing logo... doesnt look much like "our" power computing so I guess your right, could be a PC company one I guess.


Just a pic with the top off, not much to see tbh.


The main board that the drive interfaces connect to.

And the floppy drives are a Mitsubishi MF504B (A 1.2Meg 5.25" drive) and a FD1036 full height 3.5" "720k" floppy drive that google says will work on the miggy just fine, unaltered.
So at the very least I have a nice a2000 floppy out of it ;-)