Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

[salfter@salfter.ncc74656.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter)]

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In article <398f302a$1@hal.grnco.net>, Arkain <rwking@no.usa.spam.net> wrote:
>I made a mistake about the controllers... It was the physcal drives
>themselves that had the limitation, but the medium itself was indeed 80
>track. It is possible to take one of those 5.25" disks and format it in a PC
>to 160K but no higher since the density of the magnetic elements on the
>disk's surface isn't high enough.

That's funny...I used to format them to 720K all the time.  5.25" DSDD
floppies could be formatted in a high-density floppy drive with 80 tracks
instead of the usual 40.  Some systems even used this as their standard
format; they called it "quad density."  Linux handles these disks with no
problem, but driver support is needed to do this under DOS or Win9x.

When 5.25" DSDD floppies were selling at Computer City for a dime each in
bulk, reformatting them to 720K provided the cheapest bulk storage
available at the time (at least without taking tape drives into
consideration).

The reason you can't do this with normal double-density floppy drives (such
as the Disk II and friends) is that the head in these drives is too wide to
reliably write 80 distinct tracks to the disk.  The high-density floppy
drives (of the "1.2-meg" variety) have narrower heads and can cram more
tracks onto the disk.

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(IIGS(  Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull number for email address)
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