Two floppy drives?

[walter_J64bit]

When I got my first Atari 1040 STf it came with one external floppy SF354 wich I never use I couldn't do anything with the 360k format so I've just removed it. Now today I don't seen any need to have two floppy drives in this day and age of hard drives. So do you all use two floppy drives?

[galax]

I used to use two floppy drives when I had no hard disk.

 

Some programs need to access their disk occasionally, so I would keep the disk in, and put data disks in the other drive. When using Calamus, I would often have to swap disks around for various reasons such as loading fonts. I had Protext set up to set up over two disks- on boot a ramdisk would be created and the spellcheck files copied there from drive B: (too big to all fit on A:). Worked very well and made spell checking blindingly fast.

 

The only reasons I can see for having a floppy drive at all are file transfer to another machine and copy protected games that haven't been STX'd.

 

Is anyone out there really still using single sided disks?

[Charlie_]

I used to use two floppy drives just because I had the 3rd party external drive.

I don't see much of a need for two drives if you have a hdd / SD solution.

You do need the A drive though, not everything is hdd patched and some games, even cracked versions are written to access the A drive.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Now I barely use floppy drive with Ataris. But in past I had 2 drives attached, and one was HD. It was good for copying, gaming, programming etc.

 

"The only reasons I can see for having a floppy drive at all are file transfer to another machine and copy protected games that haven't been STX'd"

 

Floppy drive is still very useful with Ataris. For instance when you need to partition hard disk or Flash card and install hard disk driver

[IainGrimm]

I do have 2 floppy drives, one built in and an additional external drive also. I don't have the second drive hooked up all the time though. Only use it on the games that you can't install to the hard drive. I have all the adventure games I have installed to the USD like Monkey Island and Op Stealth (James Bond : The Covert Affair), also have things like Knights of the Sky and Their Finest Hour installed but F19 from Microprose won't allow a Hard Drive install so I hook the extra floppy drive up to play it with minimal disk swapping.

 

It comes in handy occasionally but its a bit of a pain requiring its own power so have to connect a kettle lead to the end before I can plug it in, will probably be able to clip the end off it actually and just put a plug onto it.

[Android8675]

I just love the idea of floppy drives, I'm planning to buy an external for my 1040, just to have it. My 130XE has a KarinMaxiDrive which lets me hook up 3.5" PC drives, I love it. I want to encase 2 3.5" drives vertically in acrylic, if I ever find someone who can help me make custom acrylic cases. hint hint.

[Muzz73]

I have no mass storage solution as of yet, so dual floppy drives it is!

 

Definitely looking into mass storage, though... even with two drives, it's still a pain in the backside to rummage through 700+ floppy disks looking for this or that.

 

Once done, I can't imagine using either FDD much.

[walter_J64bit]

I have no mass storage solution as of yet, so dual floppy drives it is!

 

Definitely looking into mass storage, though... even with two drives, it's still a pain in the backside to rummage through 700+ floppy disks looking for this or that.

 

Once done, I can't imagine using either FDD much.

Yup, you need hard drive. 700 + floppy disks!

[shalroth]

I used to use two floppy drives when I had no hard disk.

 

Some programs need to access their disk occasionally, so I would keep the disk in, and put data disks in the other drive. When using Calamus, I would often have to swap disks around for various reasons such as loading fonts.

 

I used to do this too, in the dark days before I got my first hard disc. Calamus disk with fonts and a couple of accessories in A:, work disk in B:. Also, NVDI / MagiC (back when it was still called Mag!X) in A:, Application and work disk in B: (fortunately not many GDOS applications accessed the source disk too often, in my experience). Cubase disk in A:, work disk in B:... made for easier module loading...

 

I may still be using some single-sided disks, but in a double-sided drive... and they're historical / vintage disks, so not my fault

[galax]

The other really important reason for having 2 drives back in the day was that it allowed a disk to be copied without any swapping. Very important when you have friends over and are copying each others' compact menus

[Charlie_]

Before I had SatanDisk or UltraSatan I used to like having a 1.44 DSHD floppy in the Mega STe and a DSDD external.

It was really easy to put MSA images on the 1.44 HD disk on the PC and then write the image to the DSDD drive B on the Mega STe.

[shalroth]

The other really important reason for having 2 drives back in the day was that it allowed a disk to be copied without any swapping. Very important when you have friends over and are copying each others' compact menus

 

In my ST days (by which I mean, when my ST was my primary computer) I didn't have any other ST-owning friends for about three years, and then he mainly had it for sequencing and had a mono monitor. I don't remember if he used to use it on a TV set as well, but the main data we exchanged were MIDI files and applications. I got my dodgy copy of Mag!x off him...but I don't think we exchanged menu disks (our school music teacher was quite relaxed about letting us have copies of Cubase Lite... it's ok now because it's freely available). Most of my friends had Amigas. Only one of them used it to it's maximum potential.