XF551 and 3.5" High-Density Floppy Drive

[Dmitry]

oh by the way, even though I saved a few bucks by buying an old drive with jumpers on the back, there are several ebay vendors selling atari/amiga drives already modded for drive 0, and since they warranty it to work, and they are only $50 or so, not a bad choice either, if you don't want to solder.

[+Larry]

Congratulations on your success! 

 

It's unfortunate that the parts for these conversions are getting difficult/expensive to come by.  (@Dropcheck has helped the cause a great deal!) I've always been of the opinion that the best use for an XF551 is to make it into a dedicated 720K drive.  But 720K is the practical end of the line.  I don't believe that any of the attempts at 1440K were ever really successful (100% reliable).  Even Floppy Board HD disks suffer disk failures after a few months/years.  But 720K-DD is rock-solid in my experience.  I can pull out 720K disks that I wrote 20+ years ago and they read/write just fine. 

 

If you get adventuresome, you might consider putting a power switch and drive select switch (if needed) on the front of the drive.  That is a lot handier than reaching for the on/off switch on the back. Drive select is handy, too.  I use just D1-D2 on mine).

[Dmitry]

46 minutes ago, Larry said:

Congratulations on your success! 

 

It's unfortunate that the parts for these conversions are getting difficult/expensive to come by.  (@Dropcheck has helped the cause a great deal!) I've always been of the opinion that the best use for an XF551 is to make it into a dedicated 720K drive.  But 720K is the practical end of the line.  I don't believe that any of the attempts at 1440K were ever really successful (100% reliable).  Even Floppy Board HD disks suffer disk failures after a few months/years.  But 720K-DD is rock-solid in my experience.  I can pull out 720K disks that I wrote 20+ years ago and they read/write just fine. 

 

If you get adventuresome, you might consider putting a power switch and drive select switch (if needed) on the front of the drive.  That is a lot handier than reaching for the on/off switch on the back. Drive select is handy, too.  I use just D1-D2 on mine).

Thanks.   One reason why I concentrate on the floppy drive solution, is it really is quite a bit more elegant than other hardware, for what I do.

 

I will pick on sio2sd for a moment. I'm forever finding that that its no longer on d1, now its click it 10 button clicks to get it back do d1, and whoops, clicked past it, do another 10 clicks.  Then switch buttons and click, click, click, click, try to find an ATR, and so on and so forth.

 

I feel like this is a real upgrade to sio2sd.  The XF551 is just a drive, it doesn't know how to be something else, and that is the beauty of it.

 

 

Honestly most of the modern solutions are geared towards helping someone with thousands of titles manage their large collection.  But that isn't my retro hobby. I just have a few projects I'm working on, and 5 disks is twice as many as I really need, haha

 

I wouldn't mind getting a second xf551 though.  I hope that dropchecks work gets incorporated by a dealer or two into fully purchasable disk drives, kind of like zaxon was doing for a while.  I'd pick up another one.

[Gunstar]

15 hours ago, Dmitry said:

oh by the way, even though I saved a few bucks by buying an old drive with jumpers on the back, there are several ebay vendors selling atari/amiga drives already modded for drive 0, and since they warranty it to work, and they are only $50 or so, not a bad choice either, if you don't want to solder.

I'll have to start looking into this...I bought one of Dropcheck's SF551 boards a couple years ago, and I have the board from an ST drive for some parts. I need to find the rest of the parts needed and a drive. The plan is to install it internally in my 1200XL. Though I'm not sure I need a drive to be modded for drive 0. I'm not up on 3.5" disk tech, but if I want to use this drive as drive 1 on my 1200XL does it need to be set for drive 0? I'm used to the standard drive numbering of 1-8 for floppy drives and stuff like my CF card drive on Incognito set for drive 0 (or is that the Fat partion?) I just jumped in on this last page though and need to read the rest of the conversation in this thread...

 

Edited January 17, 2021 by Gunstar

[Mathy]

Hello Larry

 

8 hours ago, Larry said:

I don't believe that any of the attempts at 1440K were ever really successful (100% reliable).  Even Floppy Board HD disks suffer disk failures after a few months/years.

 

I've used multiple 3.5" 1,44 MB drives (at the same time!) for years.  The only problems I had was with the flat cable having no strain relief, which caused a short circuit in the cable, which caused the drives to start formatting my disks a couple of times.  After that, I soldered a connector to the BB that made it possible to use a connector on the flat cable that could be used with a strain relief.  The problem never occurred after that.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

 

[+Larry]

 Are you saying that you have used a BB/FB in high density mode (not 720K) and had stable disks over time?  Not my experience, and I even talked to Bob Puff about it.  As a result, I stuck with 720K. 

Edit: I always used DD disks for 720K and HD disks for 1440K. 

[Mathy]

Hello Larry

 

AFAICR yes.  1.44 MB, not 1.2 MB.  But I used real 1.44 MB disks.  720 KB disks formatted at 1.44 MB don't work.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

[BillC]

17 hours ago, Gunstar said:

Though I'm not sure I need a drive to be modded for drive 0. I'm not up on 3.5" disk tech, but if I want to use this drive as drive 1 on my 1200XL does it need to be set for drive 0?

Atari just connected DS0 to MOTOR via a trace for drive selection on the XF551, adding another connection to DS1 on the PCB should allow many 3.5" FDD mechanisms to work without modification  as long as all the other 3.5" mechanism jumper settings are compatible with the XF551.