[Coco] 3.5 in 720K vs 1.4 meg floppy diskettes

[Ray Watts]

Chris Spry wrote:

>I've played around with this quite a bit actually and here is my experience
>with this sort of thing:
>
>1.44MB 3.5" Floppy drive acting as a 720k drive.....works great!  I've put
>together several dual floppy drives with this configuration and it works
>great with DD 720k floppy disks.  My current config at home is this
>configuration (/DO is a 360k 5.25" floppy and /D1 is a 1.44MB Floppy).  Have
>yet to have a DD 720k disk fail on me (even formatted as 160k in RS-DOS!).
>
>Putting a 1.44MB floppy disk in and formatting it as double or single
>density (720k or 160k under RSDOS)....sucks!  Very unreliable.  Most of the
>time I start losing data and get I/O errors anywhere from days to weeks
>after initiation (on rare occasions hours). Even with the second hole taped
>over to trick the drive.
>
>-Chris Spry
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Marty Goodman" <martygoodman at worldnet.att.net>
>To: <rayanddoraleew at earthlink.net>
>Cc: "Arthur Flexser" <flexser at fiu.edu>; "CoCo List" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 3:55 PM
>Subject: [Coco] 3.5 in 720K vs 1.4 meg floppy diskette
>  
>

It seems to me, from the evidence presented so far,  that problems with 
using 1.4mb disks formatted at 720k primarily occur when using a combo 
(1.4/720) drive.  The majority of my drives are NEC DD only, which are 
very quiet and dependable, having lasted over 10 years.  Not only have I 
not had any failures on my 1.4mb disks, but the occasional maverick 720k 
disk (especially used ones) that won't format under OS-9 will do so, and 
remain reliable at 160k under DECB.  Needless to say, all those horror 
stories are leaving me confused.

Griz