The Sinclair QL Forum

I found somewhere something about QL being able to format those disks to 3.2MB.
IS there actually floppy interface, capable of working with those for QL ?

Short answer: Yes, it is.
I have ED drives connected to SuperGold card.
Gold card can be used, too.

I believe any interface that uses the later specification (IBM PS/2) disk controller can talk to the ED or 4MB floppy drives - they are 4Mb unformatted, but only with their specific media for that. You can find some good info on these drives and the controllers here: https://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html

There is, I believe an extra signal on the floppy cable for density selection - so the new interface gives 2 density selections - 720 / 1.44M and 2.88M (on a PC) QL can format these to a higher capacity - hence 780, 1.6 and 3.2 capabilities - although I think Gold and super gold card limited the middle density to 1.44 for compatibility with PC disks.

You may find some cheaper 2.88Mb floppy drives from ex IBM equipment - but they are sometimes odd physical sizes (taller) or lack a button on the front and support electronic eject, I don't know that the later disk interfaces for the QL do support that.

I recall that Mitsubishi/Panasonic (Matsushita), TEAC, Sony, IBM and Citizen all had drives at 4MB back in the day.

Mouser still sell a floppy controller that supports 2.88MB (3.2MB on the QL) drives:

https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/268/37c78-468028.pdf

From memory 2.88 floppies are more unreliable than microdrives and usually wouldn't read on a different drive which is why they are rare and didn't take off. Why bother with floppies when there is the SD plug in floppy emulator that connects to a floppy port?

Ruptor wrote:From memory 2.88 floppies are more unreliable than microdrives and usually wouldn't read on a different drive which is why they are rare and didn't take off. Why bother with floppies when there is the SD plug in floppy emulator that connects to a floppy port?

Any 1.44MB disks I ever wrote with the QL using the ED drives are still readable on at least 3 variants of 1.44MB floppy drive, including a USB one - can't speak for ED media - I gave most of them away when I sold my original QL rig with ED drive / hard disk, qubide, super gold card...

Brane2 wrote:

Brane2 wrote:

Brane2 wrote:

Any special address for ED drives and floppies ?
They are expensive on Ebay...

I have a single ED Verbatim disk that I can send you for free Brane (because I have a nice pack of 10 and this odd 11th one doesn't fit anywhere).

Pr0f wrote:

Ruptor wrote:From memory 2.88 floppies are more unreliable than microdrives and usually wouldn't read on a different drive which is why they are rare and didn't take off. Why bother with floppies when there is the SD plug in floppy emulator that connects to a floppy port?

Any 1.44MB disks I ever wrote with the QL using the ED drives are still readable on at least 3 variants of 1.44MB floppy drive, including a USB one - can't speak for ED media - I gave most of them away when I sold my original QL rig with ED drive / hard disk, qubide, super gold card...

I found the 3.2MB disks to be quite reliable on a QL system as long as they were used in the same drive as they were written onto or formatted.

Over the years, I had two other ED drives in addition to the Miracle Systems one. Trying to move disks from one ED drive to another ED drive didn't always work (although swapping drive 1 and drive 2 on the Miracle units was quite reliable). I stopped using the 3.2MB ED disks as they proved to be less reliable than other floppy disks in this respect.

Formatting and writing to HD 1.44MB disks on any of my ED drives made it an extremely hit and miss trying to read them on another HD drive, although they usually worked well enough on the ED drives.

dilwyn wrote:

Pr0f wrote:

Ruptor wrote:From memory 2.88 floppies are more unreliable than microdrives and usually wouldn't read on a different drive which is why they are rare and didn't take off. Why bother with floppies when there is the SD plug in floppy emulator that connects to a floppy port?

Any 1.44MB disks I ever wrote with the QL using the ED drives are still readable on at least 3 variants of 1.44MB floppy drive, including a USB one - can't speak for ED media - I gave most of them away when I sold my original QL rig with ED drive / hard disk, qubide, super gold card...

I found the 3.2MB disks to be quite reliable on a QL system as long as they were used in the same drive as they were written onto or formatted.

Over the years, I had two other ED drives in addition to the Miracle Systems one. Trying to move disks from one ED drive to another ED drive didn't always work (although swapping drive 1 and drive 2 on the Miracle units was quite reliable). I stopped using the 3.2MB ED disks as they proved to be less reliable than other floppy disks in this respect.

Formatting and writing to HD 1.44MB disks on any of my ED drives made it an extremely hit and miss trying to read them on another HD drive, although they usually worked well enough on the ED drives.

I used to format the disks on the PC then format over the top on the QL - for some reason that seemed to be more reliable.

Formatting and writing to HD 1.44MB disks on any of my ED drives made it an extremely hit and miss trying to read them on another HD drive, although they usually worked well enough on the ED drives.

We had similar with ED drives on DEC machines at uni, DD disks formatted/written on them would work everywhere. HD disks rarely could be read on any other machine. Drove the PC owning students mad.

Pr0f wrote:

dilwyn wrote:
I used to format the disks on the PC then format over the top on the QL - for some reason that seemed to be more reliable.

Yes, I'm sure that formatting in the "optimal" density drive for the disk concerned first would be more reliable.