If you deal with IBMs, these drives can help transfer files
Reviewed By BURT VAUGHAN
Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group
Most of my business connections are extramural and I have a preference for my accelerated Mac Plus (Gemini ’030) over a comparatively sluggish Mac IIcx. This deals me out for FDHD (high-density floppy) drives, in a situation where I need to regularly exchange files between IBM and Macintosh computers.
For these reasons, I looked into the following available floppy disk drives. Current mail order house prices are shown for comparison.
• AE HD Mac Drive; Applied Engineering ($250). This drive is unsuitable for the Mac Plus, Mac 512ke or early Mac SEs because it requires internal circuitry available only on FDHD equipped Macs. The remaining four drives can be used with any of these non-FDHD Macs.
• TurboFloppy 1.4, SuperFloppy 1.4; Peripheral Land, Inc. ($350, $450). TurboFloppy provides read, write and boot capabilities with 1,440k Macintosh formats on 3.5-inch, high-density (HD) disks. It does not support 400k and 800k Macintosh formats. For the IBM, read, write and format capabilities are available at 1440k on HD disks, but no boot capability. This drive and Superfloppy, below, daisy chain to the SCSI port. Neither requires a software driver, and both have their own power supply.
• SuperFloppy provides read, write, format and boot capabilities at 400k, 800k, and 1,440k in Macintosh formats. For IBM, read, write and format capabilities are available, but no boot capability. The drive will format DOS at 720k or 1,440k on high-density disks.
Rapport and Kennect Drive 2.4; Kennect Technology ($520). The Kennect Drive 2.4 provides read, write and format capabilities for all Macintosh formats and 720k or 1,440k IBM formats. No boot capability is provided for either DOS or Mac disks.
The drive requires Rapport, which is a piece of hardware that attaches to your floppy port, and a software driver. You can daisy chain other 5.25-inch drives on the floppy port. The Kennect Drive 2.4 with Rapport also makes possible higher storage formats on both standard and high density media, but only a Kennect drive can read the special formats (e.g., 2,400k).
Dayna File II; Dayna Communications Inc. ($450). The Dayna File II 1.44MB drive provides read, write, format and boot capabilities for the 1,440k Macintosh format on high-density disks. For the IBM, it provides read, write and format capabilities at either 720k or 1,440k on high-density disks.
It provides no boot capability from IBM formatted disks and it will not read 400k and 800k Macintosh disks.
The only one of these drives for non-FDHD Macs that offered the same capabilities as the Apple FDHD was SuperFloppy 1.4. With the drive, I used MacLink Plus translators and DOS Mounter software, which are much faster than Apple File Exchange. At 1,440k, the SuperFloppy read and wrote DOS files, and formatted 3.5-inch disks for IBM without hitch.
Formatting, translating and hard-disk file-copy performance were also measured for TurboFloppy 1.4, Kennect Drive 2.4, and Dayna File II, in MacUser magazine for February 1990. The measures are probably not comparable here because of differences in software and SuperFloppy was not available.
In a general, I find SuperFloppy about as easy and rapid to use as my internal disk drive. It is somewhat noisier.
SuperFloppy also provides a DOS format option at 720k, for either high-density or double-sided double-density (2DD) 3.5-inch diskettes. This option is obscure and the manual is silent on it. When I formatted HD disks for IBM at 720 K, those files also were read without difficulty by people using IBM PS/2 computers.
My SuperFloppy drive rejected 2DD disks that were formatted at 720k on the IBM PS/2 computer.
The people I deal with routinely use 2DD disks formatted in IBM drives clearly designated “1.4”. I don’t know whether or not this is proper IBM technic, but such disks were always rejected as unreadable by the SuperFloppy drive.
The bottom line is to simply use a high-density disk whenever DOS files needs to be mounted.
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