Re: 800k USB floppy drive?

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

Greg Buchner <nobody@wavetech.net> wrote:

>In article 
> emil_sarlija@mac.com (Emil Sarlija) wrote:
>
>> MacOS 8 onwards doesn't support 800k floppies. Sucks, eh?
>
>Mac OS 8 does support 800k floppies.  Mac OS 9 supports 800k
>floppies.
>
>Some Macs released since Mac OS 8 don't support drives that
>will do 800k, but the OS seems to do it just fine...

    The main issue was sometime around 1993-94 Apple replaced
their Sony floppy mechanisms (with auto inject feature) with less
expensive drives. These maintained GCR compatibility support
but from stories I've heard, they were *far* less reliable accessing
800K/GCR than the original Sony-brand SuperDrive mechanisms.

    You can easily spot them as disks must be manually pushed in 
the drive to be inserted and there's the presence of a dust shutter
(much like PC drives today). Of course floppy drives were phased 
out entirely from the Macintosh line by around 1998-99, making
the matter much worse.

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca