>Would anyone be able to give me info on the high density floppy drives that
>are coming onto the market. Things like compatibility, where to get it
>from, etc.
> Thanks in advance
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The Amiga HD drives are a special drive made by Chinon for C=. When the drive
detects a high density disk has been inserted, it spins at half speed (150rpm
instead of 300rpm) and trackdisk.device checks index sync to find out what
speed the drive is spinning at, and thus what density it is. It has to spin
at half speed so that the custom chips int the amiga had twice as much time
to complete their dma burst. They will give around 1.76 Mb formatted capacity,
but the transfer speed is the same so it will take twice as long to fill one up.
They should be transperent to anything that uses standard dos calls, however
anything that tries to access trackdisk directly may be in trouble if it was
not written to C= guidelines. Programs like QuaterBack etc. handle them fine.
I'm not sure, but they could be a bit flakey in a 68000 machine because they
require 2 dma bursts as the registers in the custom chips are not big enough
do do a complete transfer in 1. Under heavy cpu loading, there is a possibility that a track could be corrupted. Not having one to try it out, I can't really
tell for sure. They require 2.04 to work, of course. Also, a PD program called HDfixer is required as trackdisk has a bug which sometimes stops it recognising when you change disk sizes.
I can't remember the part no, but they can be ordered through any dealer (If you talk nicely). However, expect a long wait, as they are a pretty hot item, and
