Apple PC 5.25 Drive for the SE and Mac II (and perhaps others)

I was doing some research on the DaynaFile for a blog entry I'm writing and came across a mention of the Apple PC 5.25 Drive, has anyone ever seen one of these?

I had one for a while, passed it on to @jeremywork earlier this year (or maybe late last year?) to go with his collection of PC cards. The note in the review about it only working with AFE is not strictly speaking true, though may have been at time of launch; as @jeremywork pointed out in his great taxonomy of PC cards, several of those also had an external port for this drive so one could use 5.25" floppies on the PC side.

It's a very simple peripheral, basically a standard PC drive in an Apple-branded enclosure. I think even the pinout is compatible with the old IBM PC external floppy drives (though I only did a very cursory investigation of that which I now only half-remember). I never had the SE card, but the NuBus card has a startlingly high number of components for what is presumably just a PC floppy drive controller on a board, which makes me wonder if it has other tricks up its sleeve on the hardware level that never surfaced as software.

But perhaps it was just designed by someone who was having too much fun.

A couple of months ago, I purchased two Apple PC 5.25" drives on eBay along with the hard-to-find (but necessary) NuBus controller card for the Mac II series. I had several threads showing my progress in getting the PC drive to work with System 7.1 on my IIfx to view PC/DOS documents from my Commodore PC-10 III in addition to SoftWindows 1.0.2. All of those threads were unfortunately deleted during the recent site crash.

The consensus was the 5.25" drive works better in System 6 - Apple File Exchange was sometimes buggy in System 7.1 and would hang the IIfx when transferring data from a well-known working DOS disk. As for SoftWindows, it would recognize the 5.25" drive in both DOS and Windows 3.1, but would not load or install programs from any of my DOS disks (I would get an error message). This was likely due to the 5.25" drive not being officially supported by SoftWindows. According to the owner's manual, only a handful of 5.25" drives are supported, one of them being DaynaFile's own concoction. Currently on the lookout for a working DaynaFile drive.

Agreed: it really doesn't fit well into the System 7 "model". The fact that it's not supported in PC Exchange is quite telling, I think.

If and when I get my IIx running, I'll load System 6.0.8 and try out the PC drive. Both Varta batteries are dead and I need to find someone who can solder in some battery holders a-la IIfx.