exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

For some reason I had it in my head that the 354 was a 360k drive and the 314 was 720k but I just read in the 314 service manual that is a 360k unit. Are both drives both sizes?

Thanks

Utr

UnderTheRain wrote: 20 Dec 2022 20:21 For some reason I had it in my head that the 354 was a 360k drive and the 314 was 720k but I just read in the 314 service manual that is a 360k unit. Are both drives both sizes?

Thanks

Utr

The SF354 is a single sided drive with only one head and only supports 360K SSDD media. IIRC it will read just one side of 720k floppies, but of course the disks cannot be flipped so the other side remains inaccsessible.

The SF314 is a double sided drive with 2 heads and supports 720K DSDD media. It will AFAIK read SSDD media and can therefore support 360K floppies.

It is possible that there are some early SF314s that had single sided drives, but I'd expect the majority to be double sided. I'd expect you could fit a single sided drive in the SF314 enclosure and it would work fine as a single sided drive.

That manual is wrong. The SF314 is the double-sided drive. The enclosures are identical and either size drive can be fitted. (There are actually at least three generations of the enclosure though, small button above slot, small button below slot and long button. There may also be two long button varients, one for a Chinon drive and one for an Epson.)

It can be confirmed if you look at the drive heads. A lot of long button types ive seen only had 1 head.

exxos wrote: 21 Dec 2022 04:49 It can be confirmed if you look at the drive heads. A lot of long button types ive seen only had 1 head.

Those would have been in the Chinon based SF354 drives. It was the model number which distinguished between the single-sided and double-sided drives as they were otherwise identical.

Thanks everyone for the replies :)

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