New Laser UDC Card and Laser 3.5" drives. Neato!!

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

All,

So I somehow lucked into winning an ebay auction for a 2nd generation
Laser UDC (Universal Disk Controller) Card and two Laser-branded 3.5"
floppy drives where the final bid price was less than shipping. How no
one spotted this auction I'll never know.

Anyway, those of you with long memories (Google says I posted about
this card in 1991), I used to own such a card when I was at Beagle Bros
and I never had satisfactory results with a variety of 3.5 drives,
including Apple 3.5's, AE's 800k 3.5, and some macintosh 3.5" drives.
Well I guess I had a bum card, because this one works just fine with
Apple 3.5 drives, that AE 3.5 drive, and it works just dandy with the
Laser 3.5 drives, all in the exact same //e I tried with this back
then. I haven't bothered timing various operations, but they are pretty
close to the same speed.

The Laser drives are interesting. They look like PC 3.5" drives in a
beige shoebox, complete with a large, square eject button. There are
cutouts on the back of the drives for a daisy-chain connector that
isn't there, and a cutout for what seems like a power adapter that also
isn't there. On the bottom there's a cutout with a label that reads
"Low" and "High" but no switch inside the cutout. The feet are made of
cork instead of ruber - I wonder why? They sound "raspy" when they
operate, but they seem to function fine. I won't let them touch any
valuable disks until they've been thoroughly worked out, but they seem
to read, write, and boot just fine.

The eject mechanism is also interesting. I had always heard that these
were "manual eject" drives, rather like a moden PC floppy drive. The
button does indeed eject the drive in a manual fashion - against some
sort of spring tension, and there's no motorized noise. Therefore
imagine my surprise when ProSel's Backup and Restore programs were able
to eject disks from these drives automatically! They eject in
slow-motion, and even the manual button "pops out." Werid.

As for what to do with them. Hmmm. I already have a Liron card and two
perfectly fine UniDisk 3.5 drives attached to it. I suppose I *could*
get some cheap Apple 3.5 drives and plug them into the UDC, along with
the DuoDisk unit, and thereby eliminate one card AND allow for 2:1
interleaving on the 3.5" disks in the //e. The UDC uses phantom slots,
so I couldn't make use of the free slot, but I guess it would reduce
the electrical load on the power supply.

Otherwise, this looks like some hardware that may only come out for
compatibility testing. Thoughts?

-Warr