Converting PC 3.5" floppy Drives to work on the Amiga
1,080
Published 2024-07-10
Two of these drives were needed to get my two external Amiga floppy drives back on their feet. If you need to replace an Amiga drive, follow along and learn how to do it. Its (relatively) easy!
PCBWay Affiliate Link: Use this link to order, get $5 credit and also help Retronaut grow
pcbway.com/g/0aMj5i
www.pcbway.com/project/
Affiliate Links
Aixun T3A Soldering Station
ebay.us/yTF873
Weller WSW SAC M1 (T0051402599) Lead Free Solder Wire, Ø 0.8mm
amzn.to/4cABrD0
• Help the channel to improve & grow by supporting us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/retronauttech/membership
• Drop us a tip, & support us on Ko0-Fi: ko-fi.com/retronauttech
elgensrepairs.blogspot.com/2012/10/modding-teac-fd…
linuxjedi.co.uk/2020/12/05/converting-a-pc-floppy-…
Samsung SFD 321B Manual
jope.fi/drives/SAMSUNG-SFD321B-070103.pdf
Teac FD -235HF C291 Manual
hxc2001.com/download/datasheet/floppy/thirdparty/T…
00:00 - Intro
04:00 - Amiga vs PC Pin-outs
07:12 - Samsung Mod Breakdown
11:35 - Alps Mod Breakdown
14:19 - TEAC Mod Breakdown
20:43 - Apply Alps Mods
37:17 - Alps Drive Test
40:22 - Apply TEAC Mods
50:06 - TEAC Drive Test
51:36 - Conclusion
#amigas #amiga1000 #amiga500 #amiga2000 #amiga3000 #amiga4000 #retro #retrocomputer #computerrepair #upgrade #upgrades #retropc
All Comments (9)
-
Fab vid! Just FYI… there’s a GitHub project called Amiga-HDDLW that aims to replicate an old adaptor to allow specifically modded PC drives to format to 1.76MB, for later Amiga’s like the A4000. I’ve literally just modded a Sony drive and am going to give this adaptor a test soon… fingers crossed!
-
Both my Amiga 3000 and 4000 came with HD floppy drives (1.76 MB). This was fully supported in the OS starting from 2.0 if I remember correctly. I often used HD disks for doing backups and storing data. But I never came across any software being shipped on HD disks or anything being distributed on disks that size. And it was convenient that I could use 1.44 MB PC formated HD disks to transfer data between PCs and my Amiga with CrossDOS - but this is not something you are likely to do today. So yes, for most practical retro purposes, focusing on getting a modern drive to just handle common 880 kB disks make sense.
-
great video and this has inspired me go through all my floppy drives seeing if they have pads that can be modified and sorting them out...
-
I am sure I have several of these drives in my stash
-
Have you tested transferring data between a PC HD floppy and an Amiga using one of these drives? Many (20+) years ago I heard about converting PC HD floppies, but the problem was the Amiga slows the motor to 150RPM for HD disks, and floppy drive motors are tuned for 300RPM. Slowing down a standard motor resulted in instability and data jitter bad enough for the disks to be unreadable in other drives. The actual Amiga HD floppies had special motors/circuitry to handle both speeds correctly.
-
I would love to know if its possible to convert an Apple Mac floppy to an Amiga drive. The sony drives were actually able capable of doing 2MB. Or use a PC drive to create an HD drive for an Amiga. I know some amiga's had HD drives; 1.7MB.
-
wouldn't it be easier to just develop a board to go between the drive and cables to use it in an amiga?
-
Sorry, but those drives can not provide100% amiga compatibility. RD means Read, not ready. Samsung has ready, yes, but format a disk with kick 1.3 and WB 1.3 in the CLI, after that try read the directory in the workbench...it will fail.Test all drives as internal with both external drive togehter (xcopy, games who make use of more drives). Try amiga test kit and show what ready signal says, it should be between 200-500ms. You might find problems.
