New 5 1/4" DD Floppies?

[ballyalley]

I have a bunch of Atari floppy drives I'd like to test (810s, 1050s, an XF551, a Percom and some others).  I've looked around for New Old Stock 5 1/4" floppy disks and I've found some, but I'm not sure which sources to trust.  When did manufactures stop making new 5 1/4" DD disks?  I imagine it was probably in the early-to-mid-1990s.

 

Is there a reliable source in the United States for double-density 5 1/4" floppy disks that are still shrink-wrapped?

 

Adam

[manterola]

www.floppydisk.com

Or, if you search carefully in Ebay you can get some decent prices for a good brand like tdk, verbatim or sony. But in reality you never know whether the disk are going to work or not, but those brands in my opinion, improve the likelihood of success.

 

Ex:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-TDK-M2D-Mini-Floppy-Disk-Double-Sided-Computer-disk-Factory-sealed/113257611791

[moonlight_mile]

What model of Percom do you have?

[ballyalley]

1 hour ago, manterola said:

if you search carefully in Ebay you can get some decent prices for a good brand like tdk, verbatim or sony. But in reality you never know whether the disk are going to work or not, but those brands in my opinion, improve the likelihood of success.

 

 

Thanks for the link to the new old stock TDK M2D Mini Floppy Disk Double Sided Computer disks.  I bought them for about $13.00.  They're close (just one state away).  I guess they were cheap because they are not labeled anyplace in the auction that the disks are 5 1/4" floppies.  When I got my C64 in about 1984 I used to pay (well, my parents used to pay) $4 per elephant floppy disks.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Adam

[ballyalley]

16 minutes ago, moonlight_mile said:

What model of Percom do you have?

 

It's a Percom RFD40-S2.  It has two SIO ports and some other sort of port (perhaps for use with the ATR 8000?).  I'm not sure if Atari DOS support the Percom drive, but I think MyDOS supports it.  If I have issues with it (like cleaning or getting it going), then I'll start another thread.

 

Adam

[moonlight_mile]

 
It's a Percom RFD40-S2.  It has two SIO ports and some other sort of port (perhaps for use with the ATR 8000?).  I'm not sure if Atari DOS support the Percom drive, but I think MyDOS supports it.  If I have issues with it (like cleaning or getting it going), then I'll start another thread.
 
Adam

If you decide to sell it please let me know.

Thanks.
Craig

[+slx]

This place claims to sell new 5,25" floppies. Here's a story about the company. If it is correct, everything is NOS now, since manufacturing ended a couple of years ago.

[SS]

52 minutes ago, ballyalley said:

Thanks for the link to the new old stock TDK M2D Mini Floppy Disk Double Sided Computer disks.  I bought them for about $13.00. 

Funny. I was just looking at that auction last night but put it in my watch list instead of buying it.  It was a decent price too.  Oh well, you snooze you lose. 

[manterola]

4 minutes ago, SS said:

Funny. I was just looking at that auction last night but put it in my watch list instead of buying it.  It was a decent price too.  Oh well, you snooze you lose. 

I have it in my watch list for months!!! but I ended up getting some sony ones like 6 months ago.

[BillC]

For those wanting larger quantities this is an eBay listing for 100 in sealed boxes of 10, for only $50. Listing ends today at 8:09 PDT.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Nashua-Professional-Magnetic-Media-MD2D-5-1-4-Diskettes-100-ct/223709074844?epid=3024080810&hash=item341619959c:g:QvsAAOSwHX5dp9np

 

There is also Athana International, who was a supplier of magnetic media to the US Goverment, including 8" floppies. Their website shows the contract expired last year, but this information may not have been updated after the contract was renewed.

It is necessary to contact them to find out pricing.

http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html

 

EDIT: I don't know if the Nashua  floppies are rated single of double density, the title says they are MD2D but the images show MD1D, but they should be single/double density.

Edited October 21, 2019 by BillC

[ballyalley]

12 minutes ago, BillC said:

There is also Athana International, who was a supplier of magnetic media to the US Goverment, including 8" floppies.

 

This is nice information!

 

I didn't realize that there were different types of DD 5 1/4" disks.  There is a list of them here on the Athana site that sells the disks:

 

http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html

 

Here are the two types of DD disks that I have questions about:

 

1) 5.25& Inch Diskettes DD (Double Sided, Double Density), Unformatted, 48 TPI (Soft Sector), ATHANA Box
    
2) 5.25 Inch Diskettes DD (Double Sided, Double Density), Unformatted, 96 TPI (Soft Sector), ATHANA Box

 

Now that I've looked it up, I see that TPI means Tracks Per Inch.  How many TPI do the various Atari disk drives use: 48 or 96, or does it depend on the model of the Atari disk drive?

 

(I didn't realized that this subject might bring up topic that I didn't know about already. TPI?  Who knew about that subject? I presumed double density was just plain old double density.)

 

Adam

[SS]

47 minutes ago, ballyalley said:

Now that I've looked it up, I see that TPI means Tracks Per Inch.  How many TPI do the various Atari disk drives use: 48 or 96, or does it depend on the model of the Atari disk drive?

 

This topic *just* came up on a Facebook thread too.  Apparently Atari drives need 48tpi.  The 96tpi disks are often listed as HD disks and according to @tschak909 their "magnetic coercivity is way too high for 48tpi heads, and what's recorded on those disks will degrade _very_ quickly."

[+kheller2]

I would love to read about the history of who actually manufactured the media inside the floppies over the years and how they changed.

I remember when CD-Rs were new, having to actually research identification codes to find out who really made certain media.... reliable media.

 

[manterola]

I did not know about differences b/w DD and HD until recently when I got my first 1050. I own a XF551 (with Mitsumi mech) since early nineties, and I always used any 5.25" floppy that I can put my hands on, like old used PC floppies people were getting rid when everyone switched to 3.5". 

It always works!. When I got the 1050 I tried to for,at a diskette and I got errors, I thought the disk drive was faulty, until I realized that there were two types of 5.25 floppies. I just find interesting that I've been able to use those floppies all this time without problems.

 

 

[E474]

Hi,

 

   I contacted them (Athana) a few months ago, and they said all stock was now handled by floppydisk.com. For 100 * 360k disks I got quoted $1/disk + $50 shipping (to europe). I passed as I would then have to add on 20% sales tax, import duty (not sure which category/rate would apply), and £8 processing fee from the post office. It's a pity as these guys look like the only people selling newly manufactured disks, but whatever amount I wanted, it worked out as too expensive for me.

 

In this situation, eBay can be a better bet, unfortunately I have had some (A8) disks that I bought as part of a deal that were fit only for trying to recover data from, though I recently got about 100 (mixed 360k and 1.2mb) for £17 (including P&P), so there are bargains to be had.

 

On the other hand, microSD cards are pretty cheap, which makes an Sdrive-Max, Uno Cart solution, etc., look much more attractive, though I appreciate this doesn't help much with testing a 1050 or similar. Perhaps your best bet is trying to pick up a pack of 10 online, you'll possibly end up paying a bit over the odds for them, but you can start testing the 1050s, etc., once they arrive, and you can also start staking out the job lot floppy disk sales market. I remember when I got back into the Atari 8-bit there were a few things I wanted to get, but I decided to keep an eye on what was for sale for a month or so before doing any bidding, just to get an idea of what were reasonable prices.

 

Hope this helps!

[+CharlieChaplin]

1 hour ago, SS said:

This topic *just* came up on a Facebook thread too.  Apparently Atari drives need 48tpi.  The 96tpi disks are often listed as HD disks and according to @tschak909 their "magnetic coercivity is way too high for 48tpi heads, and what's recorded on those disks will degrade _very_ quickly."

 

Sorry, but I think this is not true...

96tpi DD-disks are normally NOT HD disks! They are DD, with 96tpi and max. 720kbytes...

 

(After the 360k DD-disks in 1978 there were 720k DD-disks in 1982, but they were "replaced" very fast with the 1.2MB HD disks in 1984, which were replaced by 3,5" disks. The 96tpi DD-disks / 720k disks were often named QD or Quad.)

 

Afair, Athana does not produce 5,25" disks for the US government anymore (since that is not needed any longer). Even the computers for the nuclear weapons that use 8" floppy disks with 80k per diskside are NOW replaced with newer ones that work without floppy disks. So it looks like no-one is producing new 5,25" disks any longer, so sooner or later we will run out of them...

 

[ballyalley]

Wow, this topic has really become much more interesting then I would ever have anticipated.

 

I always knew that there were some weird and uncommon floppy disks out there.  In the late 1990s I worked at a place that had IBM PS/2s (I think) that came standard with 2.88MB floppy disks.  I'm not sure how old these computers were at the time I worked there.  Then there are the unusual 3" floppy drives.  I think some computers in Europe came standard with this uncommon size drive.  I'm not sure how many people use 8" floppies, I suppose that it's technically possible on the Atari, but did anyone actually use these huge disks?  I think those disks can hold around 1MB, and they date back to the 1970s.

 

The Antic podcast has recently been talking about 3 1/2" floppies for the Atari and why would anyone want them now.  I suppose people want them now for the same reason that they want to use dot-matrix or 1020 printers with their Atari: because it's a neat thing to do to have fun with computers.  Plus, getting a 3 1/2" floppy working on an Atari allows users to have something that the Commodore users always had: the 1581 disk which used 3 1/2" floppy disks.

 

In the late 90s I used to format disks on my XF551 with MyDos 4.5 so that they were try double density: the disk could hold 360K.  They were only useful to me; I could easily share these disks with others.  I recall that even in the 1990s there were upgrades for the XF551 that allowed it to use, I think, 720K 3 1/2" drives.

 

Maybe I'll take some picture of all my Atari floppy drives and post them here over the next few days.  Some of the drives have unknown upgrades in them like Happy, maybe a US Doubler and one has a switch on the front that does, um, something neat (I hope).  I guess I won't know until I open these drives up and examine them.

 

Adam

Edited October 21, 2019 by ballyalley
word choice error

[+CharlieChaplin]

9 minutes ago, ballyalley said:

I'm not sure how many people use 8" floppies,

 

The US nuclear forces did, until a few days (weeks?) ago:  https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-forces-dr-strangelove-era-messaging-system-finally-got-rid-of-its-floppy-disks/ they did run on an IBM series/1 computer from the 1970s...

 

Maybe an A8 would have been a better system - and Missile Command on the A8 would then have had a double meaning...

 

[SS]

33 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Sorry, but I think this is not true...

96tpi DD-disks are normally NOT HD disks! They are DD, with 96tpi and max. 720kbytes...

I went back and read again what @tschak909 said on the FB thread.  I think that I may have misunderstood.  Thomas was definitely talking about HD floppies in his comment. I think that I combined the two ideas in my own mind.  Sorry, my fault completely; two conversations about similar ideas threw me off track.

[tschak909]

Ok, so wait. Yes, let me untangle this.

 

There are two types of 96tpi media:

 

* Quad Density. which is 720kbytes, and uses media with the same coercivity as double density disks. and therefore you can use them in standard Atari drives.

* High Density (IBM called it High Capacity), which is also 96tpi, but the oersted coercivity value is much higher for these disks, due to their cobalt oxide formulation, These disks require a read/write head with a much more powerful output current, and can NOT be used in anything but high density drives.

 

-Thom

[Marius]

9 hours ago, tschak909 said:

Ok, so wait. Yes, let me untangle this.

 

There are two types of 96tpi media:

 

* Quad Density. which is 720kbytes, and uses media with the same coercivity as double density disks. and therefore you can use them in standard Atari drives.

* High Density (IBM called it High Capacity), which is also 96tpi, but the oersted coercivity value is much higher for these disks, due to their cobalt oxide formulation, These disks require a read/write head with a much more powerful output current, and can NOT be used in anything but high density drives.

 

-Thom

From my experience with lots of 5.25" floppy disks I can confirm this as correct.

 

I once bought some boxes with floppy disks and they were all type of densities. I was pretty disappointed to find out that the HD disks which I tried first did not work properly. The personal shock was even bigger when I realized that there was only one box with DD.

 

There were also 3 boxes QD disks. I did not know QD, and I thought that this was another name for HD. 

 

You can understand how happy I was finding out that the QD disks also worked properly. Phew. So DD and QD both work in 1050.

 

I also bought years ago two packs of 5.25" disks with double index whole. I wished I remember where I bought those. That is a great disk type for XF551 (especially for the chinon mech which even can't read flippy disks, unless another index whole is there).

[+Nezgar]

On 10/21/2019 at 10:36 AM, ballyalley said:

It's a Percom RFD40-S2.  It has two SIO ports and some other sort of port (perhaps for use with the ATR 8000?).  I'm not sure if Atari DOS support the Percom drive, but I think MyDOS supports it.  If I have issues with it (like cleaning or getting it going), then I'll start another thread.

Atari DOS 2.0S/2.0D will work the drive, but will not be able to switch densities once it has booted in either single or double density. There is a modified version DOS 2.0P which was a patch to allow changing density with Percom drives. And even then, it won't give double-sided capacity. Thats where OS A+, MyDOS, and SpartaDOS come in.

 

If you may be willing to entertain potentially dumping the EPROM I would very much appreciate it, if so PM me. There's currently only one known to me ROM dump from a Percom RFD so far. If you don't have the means, I could mail you a programmed replacement of the ROM I currently have to ensure that your drive continues to work with it before you send yours EPROM in the mail.

 

 

[+bob1200xl]

On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2019 at 9:30 AM, ballyalley said:

 

Thanks for the link to the new old stock TDK M2D Mini Floppy Disk Double Sided Computer disks.  I bought them for about $13.00.  They're close (just one state away).  I guess they were cheap because they are not labeled anyplace in the auction that the disks are 5 1/4" floppies.  When I got my C64 in about 1984 I used to pay (well, my parents used to pay) $4 per elephant floppy disks.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Adam

Careful... those look like HD diskettes. 'Stock Photo' is DD but read all the description.

 

Bob

 

 

[+bob1200xl]

Anyone that needs some good DD disks, message me. I have many...

 

Bob

 

[ballyalley]

3 minutes ago, bob1200xl said:

Careful... those look like HD diskettes. 'Stock Photo' is DD but read all the description.

 

I looked at the auction again.  The auction claims that they're DD, but as Bob noted they're marked as M2HD in the description.  That's rather deceptive.  The issue isn't the probably stock photo, but that the auction "banner" claims that they're "TDK M2d Mini Floppy Disks Double Sided Double Density."  I guess I'll find out when they arrive.

 

If the disks are the wrong kind, then, Bob, I will take you up on your offer of many good disks.  I guess I'll find out this week.

 

Adam