Why multiple disk drives? (3+ drives)

[BassGuitari]

Probably a dumb question, but I've been wondering about this lately. I can see two drives being handy for disk copying or file transfers between disks, or leaving the DOS or operating system disk in one drive and using the second for software, or things like that. But what would the practical purpose be to having three or four or six or eight or however many drives? Same concepts on a bigger scale?

More files immediately at your disposal, perhaps? I once read about a police department somewhere back in the early '80s that had a computer (Apple II+ or Atari 800) with eight floppy drives hooked up to it, I believe for a similar purpose--they would reference different drives for various case files, sort of like a big filing system.

But other that a situation like that, what would be the point of having that many drives?

[Keatah]

BBS usage.

Home diskette duplication.

[carlsson]

You might also have productivity software that spans more than one floppy disk. On a system with no hard drive or similar storage solution, you might thus need two drives just to contain the software itself, and ideally need a third one for your own files.

 

I once ran SAS/C 6.0 on my Amiga 500+ that was equipped with 2 MB RAM but no hard drive. To begin with, I had to cut down the C installation to a minimum when it comes to compiler, libraries and so on. Still it would use two full 880K disks. Fortunately, I could use the RAM disk on the Amiga to temporarily store my source code and executables, but I got to remember to copy those back to a floppy disk before I powered off or got caught by a Guru Meditation. I think the bootable disk with the compiler had a little bit of space left for small files, but anything a little bigger wouldn't fit. If I had a DF2 at that point, it had been excellent but alas I didn't.

[BassGuitari]

BBS usage.

For my edification, and possibly that of others, can you elaborate a little? I know very little about BBSes and their usage outside of the basic concepts--how would several floppy drives be beneficial?

[pixelmischief]

Try playing Ultima IV on one drive and then you'll know EXACTLY why. =)

[Keatah]

For my edification, and possibly that of others, can you elaborate a little? I know very little about BBSes and their usage outside of the basic concepts--how would several floppy drives be beneficial?

 

Back in the day I had a nice BBS going.

 

Drive 1 would hold the BBS program framework and modules. My BBS would load different parts of itself as a user moved from section to section. This was the startup disk, and it contained DOS. Most of it was written in BASIC and modded and added to by me. We had spinning cursors, a real-time clock, lowercase, and other advancements. It also contained all the help menus and text layouts.

 

Drive 2 would hold the logs, messages, electronic mail. Essentially all the user-generated data went here.

 

Drives 3-6 would hold WaReZ. Eventually drives 3-6 were replaced by an HDD.

 

It also helped to keep things modular. When posting new wArEz it was simple to just deal with disks that contained ONLY warez. Not that the other disks had room anyways. Some warez took two or 3 sides to begin with.

 

If I wanted to work on and improve the BBS all I had to do was make a quick copy of the main/start disk and go to work on the second system. Thus not "endangering" or having to take-down the main system. Think of each drive as a folder on a modern PC.

[David Baldwin]

those amiga games with two or three disks you needed all the drives just to play the game or lots of disk swaping with one drive.

[BassGuitari]

 

Back in the day I had a nice BBS going.

 

Drive 1 would hold the BBS program framework and modules. My BBS would load different parts of itself as a user moved from section to section. This was the startup disk, and it contained DOS. Most of it was written in BASIC and modded and added to by me. We had spinning cursors, a real-time clock, lowercase, and other advancements. It also contained all the help menus and text layouts.

 

Drive 2 would hold the logs, messages, electronic mail. Essentially all the user-generated data went here.

 

Drives 3-6 would hold WaReZ. Eventually drives 3-6 were replaced by an HDD.

 

It also helped to keep things modular. When posting new wArEz it was simple to just deal with disks that contained ONLY warez. Not that the other disks had room anyways. Some warez took two or 3 sides to begin with.

 

If I wanted to work on and improve the BBS all I had to do was make a quick copy of the main/start disk and go to work on the second system. Thus not "endangering" or having to take-down the main system. Think of each drive as a folder on a modern PC.

Ah, cool. Makes sense!

[spacecadet]

Yeah, in the old days it was a lot easier to explain, because hard drives barely existed and were extremely expensive. It was much cheaper to use multiple floppies, including even buying the drives. You'd be looking at maybe $200 per floppy drive vs. $2,000 or more for a 10MB hard drive. If you were to use a computer for basically *any* purpose other than home use, you'd probably need to run whatever system you were running off of multiple floppies.

 

Nowadays there's really no point to it unless you specifically want to recreate something exactly as it would have been. The other thing is there was a transition period between 5.25" and 3.5" drives, and you might have programs that could benefit from two of either kind of drive. (A lot of stuff came on two floppies, or used one floppy for the program and one for data.) So even today and even if you're just playing games or something, if you're not using some kind of flash drive then you could still benefit from having four total drives. But more than that's probably pointless; you may as well just get a flash drive solution at that point. (They exist for most classic computers.)

Edited October 15, 2016 by spacecadet

[Keatah]

Like in the old days, the separation of DATA from PROGRAM from OS is still a good practice today. Maybe for different reasons, but still valid. If my computer was to blow up I could simply go buy a new one and not lose anything except some time reinstalling.

[BassGuitari]

I have three or more drives for many of my old computers (Apple, Atari, C64/VIC-20, TRS-80 Model II...) but the only times I've ever really used more than one was to copy some disks or transfer files, or for lazier game playing. To wit:

I set up one of my Apple IIe systems with four Disk IIs once, just for grins and giggles (a tower of Disk IIs does look pretty awesome!), but didn't have much practical use for that setup. I left a DOS disk in #1 and some of my favorite game disks in #2, #3, and #4, so I guess there was the convenience factor.

My Compaq Portable has a 5.25" drive and was retrofitted with a 3.5" drive and a hard disk, so I've got the best of all worlds there.

It seems most people had a maximum of two drives; I consider that the maximum standard loadout for something like an Apple, TRS-80/Color, Atari, or Commodore.

[spacecadet]

It seems most people had a maximum of two drives; I consider that the maximum standard loadout for something like an Apple, TRS-80/Color, Atari, or Commodore.

 

Well, see my avatar - I have four drives for my IIgs, and that was pretty common for the IIgs for exactly the reason I mentioned earlier. You had to have 5.25" drives for the 95% of Apple software that came that way, but if you wanted to use the IIgs as a IIgs, then you needed 3.5" too. Some people did have just one of each, but for the most part that's just like having an earlier Apple II with only one drive. (Honestly, I had a IIc back in the day and got away with one drive for the entire time I had it, so it was possible, just kind of limiting and annoying.)

 

Prior to the IIgs, then yeah, two 5.25" drives would have been the most common setup for the IIe and earlier. But the IIgs basically required between 2 and 4 drives.

[CatPix]

I'll try to look in the documentation, but here, the Thomson floppy drives used (probably for a legacy/compatibility reason) a single face floppy logic.

That is, if you connected a double sided disk drive on the computer, it was considered as two drives.

So conencting two physical double sided drives, even 3"5 ones gave you 4 logic units.

So connecting 8 drives, if that's even supported would give up to 16 drives for the computer

[BassGuitari]

 

Well, see my avatar - I have four drives for my IIgs, and that was pretty common for the IIgs for exactly the reason I mentioned earlier. You had to have 5.25" drives for the 95% of Apple software that came that way, but if you wanted to use the IIgs as a IIgs, then you needed 3.5" too.

I think the IIgs is an exception since, functionally, it's like two different systems in one box that each support different disk formats.

[Keatah]

It *IS* two different systems.

[JamesD]

I'm pretty sure there were business applications that used multiple drives for different programs and data.
I would expect it to be more common with custom applications than off the shelf stuff though.