Floppy drive model numbers that work in a 512k?

[Apostrophe]

Hi,

Normally to answer this question I'd just open my Mac 512k and look, but it's out of my reach at the moment.

What I'm wondering is, what 400k floppy drive models will work in a Macintosh 512k?

-Apostrophe

 

[Mac128]

What I'm wondering is, what 400k floppy drive models will work in a Macintosh 512k?

Well that is an interesting question. The driver which ships with the ROM is for Sony drives. Presumably it could work with any Sony 400K drive. The problem with those Sony 400K drives is that there is no quick way to tell them apart as they all have the same model numbers. The Lisa and Mac 400K are identical, but they work differently. This is a good site to learn more about the differences. Macgeek has an interesting article as well.

Another, problem is that the newer 400K drives, late '84, will not work with the earlier ROMs. So depending on which rev. your ROM is, it may not work with a newer drive. The rev. B ROM will work with both drives. Eric Rasmussen's excellent site has some details on this.

Sony 800K drives will also work in a stock 512K however, only certain models will boot from a 400K disk. They also create an annoying tick when used with external drives and some drives require a special cable to prevent continuous ejection. See this site for more information about that. THis trick also works more-or-less with 1.44MB SuperDrives.