Unless you've recently won the football pools, it's a
safe bet that you've had a nasty shock when the time came to buy a box of
disks for your shiny, new, ST. If, like me, you are an ex 8-bit user, used
to paying £10 to £15 per box, and cutting a notch (I know it's frowned
upon, but I've never had any problems) to double the storage, then having
to pay £25 to £50 for a box of disks, and being unable to make the
plastic 3½" disks 'flippy' floppies is quite a worry. I know you get
350k storage capacity per disk, but ST programs tend to be l-o-n-g.
The launch by AS&T Ltd., at the Atari User Show of a
5¼" double sided 1 megabyte disk drive for the ST at only £124.00
certainly seemed to offer an answer to such problems. I've been using one
for a while now, and it does...... well, almost.
The first thing to consider is that the 5¼" drive
is really only useful as a second drive. If you've bought the 520ST or the
1040ST, then you will already have a 3½" drive, and this is
particularly important, since it's very unlikely that any software houses
will release their ST titles in 5¼" format. If you buy a 520STM,
then you'll ideally need to buy a 3½" drive first (AS&T Ltd.
also sell these at prices well below the official Atari version!) to
enable you to make full use of the 5¼" drives' facilities.
The first impressions of the AST 5¼" drive is that
it is a BBC micro refugee. The case is in the same colour and stipple
finish of the Beeb, and further investigations revealed that the company
is closely linked with Solidisk - a very successful BBC O.E.M.
There's no power supply, power being obtained from a 6
pin DIN male/female piggy back lead which plugs into the semi-exposed rear
of the drive, and between the SF354/SF314 and it's power supply, thereby
running two disk drives from the single ST 3½" drive power supply
(in which case, I doubt whether you could use the 5¼" drive on the
1040ST, which does not have a separate power supply for it's drive -
unless, of course, you purchased another power supply). I'm assured that
the SF354's power supply is up to the task of running two drives, but mine
does get very hot! The lead to chain the 5¼" unit to your 3½"
drive (or directly to your ST disk port) is supplied, this being the
unusual ST 14 pin 'DIN' plug, but terminated in a PCB edge connector which
also has to be affixed to the PCB at the rear of the 5¼" unit. The
connections all seem a little delicate, and I certainly wouldn't like to
move the thing around too much.
These few connections having being made, you can insert
a 5¼" floppy disk into the drive, select drive B, and format your
disk to over 700K. You can, alternatively, notch your 5¼" and format
it as two 350K 'flippy' floppies (at your own risk!). From there on, other
than noticing that your future blank disk purchases are no longer a shock
to your wallet (or purse!), the fact that the drive is 5¼" is
totally transparent to your ST's disk controller, and anything that you
can do with a 3½" drive you can do with a 5¼".
In use the 5¼" is rather noisy - no noisier than
most Beeb drives, a little noisier than the 1050 drive, and a lot noisier
than the standard ST drives, but although the clunking and grinding is
initially a bit shocking, it does
nothing to detract from the efficiency of the drive, and eventually
becomes quite reassuring!
Disadvantages? .... I've mentioned the noise - not
really a problem. The drive also has the strange habit of 'chugging' if
you switch off your ST drive before switching off your ST - again, not a
real problem. What does present a few headaches, though, is the fact that
the 5¼" drive tends to be the 'end of the line' as far as ST drive
connectors go. Look at the rear of your SF drive, it has input and output
sockets, and these enable you to daisy chain two of your drives together.
Either drive can be used in any position. The 5¼" unit, however, has
only the PCB edge connector and onto this plugs the lead terminating in
the Atari style drive socket. This can plug into the rear of your SF354,
and the 5¼" becomes drive 'B'. Alternatively, you could plug the 5¼"
directly into the rear of your ST (just as you would with an SF354) and
use it as a single drive 'A', but it must be said that on my model this
was not possible - the drive just started 'chugging' whenever I switched
on!. I'm told that the addition of a few extra components/wires will
overcome this problem, but it's not the type of thing you would want to do
to your new £100 plus purchase. AS&T tell me that they are looking at
the situation carefully, but they don't really consider this to be a
serious drawback. You certainly cannot have your 5¼" drive as drive
'A' and your 3½" as drive 'B'.
So, what about backing up your 5¼" disks? You've
connected up your 500k SF354, and your 1Mb 5¼", you've just put all
your favourite Degas and Neo screens onto a couple of 1Mb. 5¼" disks
and you then want to do some back-ups of these disks for a friend who also
has a 5¼". You just can't do it easily, I'm afraid, because you
can't drag the drive 'B' icon over the drive 'B' icon. It's either a file
by file transfer, or you could set up the largest possible ram disk and
copy a few files at a time or you can copy over to a few blank 3½"
disks and then copy back again to your blank 5¼".
Advantages?.... well, if you have not tried a 1Mb. drive
before - it's great! 726016 free bytes when formatted (actually 11.5k more
than two single sided disks!). I now find that I can run the Digital
Research 'C' compiler and linker from a single disk, obviously speeding up
compilation times immensely (I imagine that Modula II users would have the
same benefits). Disks are much cheaper, file transfers are much easier
than with a single drive and I wouldn't be surprised if when the CP/M
emulator is freely available, you will be able to read certain CP/M disks
on the 5¼" drive (especially since a 40/80 track switch is available
as an optional extra at time of purchase). I noticed no difference in
speed of operation between the SF354 and the AS&T drive. Both are
spinning at 300 revs per minute and both appear to load ST Basic in
exactly the same amount of time.
Conclusion?.... I've bought one, and although I've had a bit of a moan
about the problems of backing up a 1Mb. disk, I certainly wouldn't part
with it or swap it for an SF314. My disks are cheaper, I can get twice as
much on them, I've freed many of my 3½" disks by putting unprotected
programs onto 5¼", and I've saved £90 on Atari's price for a 1 Mb.
drive. On reflection, I'm quite happy to put up with any of the drawbacks
I've mentioned, and the AS&T 5¼" ST drive gets my wholehearted
recommendation.
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