Re: IIgs floppy questions

[waynes@intergate.ca (Wayne Stewart)]

william strutts
> > What's the most amount of 3.5" and 5" floppy drives that a person sanely
>  can daisy chain to a IIgs?
> 
> You can have two drives of each size attached to the IIgs.  The 3.5 drives
> are chained before the 5.25 drives.

That's correct unless you also use 3.5" UniDisks. Apple says due to
the
power limitations of the drive port you can only have two 3.5"
platinum
drives, two 3.5" UniDisks and two 5.25" drives. However just to see if
anything would go up in sparks I tried two platinum 3.5" drives, four
3.5"
UniDisks and two 5.25 UniDisks. Worked but probably a very poor idea.
> 
> > What's the difference between initializing a 800K 2:1 and a 800 4:1
> floppy?
> 
> The interleave determines how far apart the contiguous blocks of data
> are physically stored from each other.  A 2:1 interleave means that the
> next data sector is 2 sectors down; a 4:1 means the next sector is 4
> sectors down.  Obviously a smaller interleave means that you can
> retrieve data faster off of the floppy.

The 4:1 interleave was really meant for the 3.5" UniDisk which can
only read every 4th block. If you try a 2:1 interleave with a 3.5"
UniDisk, by the time it's ready to read the next block it's already
past it and the disk will need to make a complete revolution to get to
it. Really really slow.

	Wayne