[Coco] help with bare 5.25 drive

[Rogelio Perea]

My FD-502 has been a reliable rock solid performer ever since I added a
second drive to it (not the kit offered by RS). I have never had a problem
with the system even as I did not install the recommended fan.

When I did this years ago I have to admit being a bit worried at first as
everywhere I read in the Radio Shack literature the fan was a must have - I
had no suitable fan to set in there and decided to trust the meter readings
on the power supply of the FD-502 drives case before and after adding the
second drive, idle and both drives running really posed no threat to the
power supply. Even intensive OS9 drive usage has been trouble free.


-- Rogelio



On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:

Whether you need a fan or not depends on which enclosure you have. That last
> one Tandy made has a marginal power supply when used with two drives, and it
> NEEDS a fan. Any made before that will usually work just fine without a fan
> unless you're doing lots of intensive disk I/O that works BOTH drives a lot
> (like running a BBS or continuous back-ups from one disk to another). Of
> course if you have one of the old grey (or white) cases with the power
> transformer sticking out the back you could probably power three half-high
> drives without heat issues! Those were originally made for power hungry full
> height drives.
> The cable connectors can be an irritant. The Tandy cable is short between
> the two drives. It was made for drives that have the edge card connector
> directly across from each other. There is no standard location for the
> connector. Some have it to one side or the other, some centered in the back.
> It's not too difficult to remove the connector and move it a little further
> down the cable, or just crimp another connector on and fold the cable up
> inside... or even make a custom cable.