Sure enough, the BIOS on a PC recognized the drive, although the geometry for a disk like this wasn’t in the BIOS choices.Ī long video, but fun to watch those giant old drives working and process of working through his issues. Some surgery on a donor cable from an old word processor made the connection. We had forgotten that the spindle motor ran on AC wall current and required a start capacitor. However, electrically, the drives are the same, so if you can make the mechanical connection, a conventional floppy controller will do the job.īeen a while since we’ve seen a big drive like this. The 8 inch floppy connector isn’t even the same as a 5.25 inch connector which PCs do support. But how do you marry a 40-something-year-old drive to a modern computer? He had a few drives of unknown condition so there was nothing to do but try to get them working. is getting ready to restore a TRS-80 Model II so he wanted to create some 8″test floppies. [Adrian asks the question: can you use an 8″ floppy drive on a PC? The answer is in the video below. These disks and their descendants ruled the computing world for a while. At its peak, you could cram about 1.2 megabytes on it, but even with the drive you could lift it all in one hand. Somewhere in the middle is the old 8 inch floppy drive. Today, a tiny postage-stamp-sized card can hold gigabytes of data and weighs - at most - a few ounces. It also weighed more than a typical refrigerator. An old IBM tape drive from the S/360 days, for example, could hold almost 6 megabytes of data. ![]() We should probably have a new metric for measuring mass storage performance: bytes per pound.
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