Re: IIe 3.5 disk drive controller card

[Greg Buchner <apple22@mn.rr.com>]

In article <20050224201401776+1300@News.Individual.NET>,
 Roger Johnstone <rojaws@orcon.net.nz> wrote:

> In <qh7jkyrat1.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com> Eric Smith  wrote:
> > Ed Eastman <noone@nowhere.net> writes:
> >> The Apple 3.5" drives all have in common that they have a variable
> >> rotation rate and can read the 800k 'standard' formatted DD disk 
> >> media.
> > 
> > All except Apple's earliest 3.5" drive used on the Lisa 2 and original
> > Macintosh, which only did 400K single-sided DD format, and recent
> > internal 3.5" drives on Macintoshes, which no longer support GCR.
> 
> A minor correction: all Apple Macintosh drives can read and write GCR 
> disks. Macs originally used variable rotation rate drives, but around 
> the intoduction of the first Power Macs Apple switched to using cheaper 
> drives with a fixed rotation rate but which varied the data rate instead. 
> These drives and/or disk controllers are the ones that have problems 
> making ProDOS 800KB disks, at least using Disk Copy.

Another minor correction: USB based floppy drives on a Mac don't write 
out the 800K GCR format in any way, shape or form that I've found out.  
I've seen one advertised that did, but that was the Ad Dept just copy & 
pasting drive capabilities without checking what the drive actually did.

Greg B.

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