As the Wintel juggernaut began to steamroll them, Apple sought ways to cut costs. While there were many reasons for this, one was Apple’s penchant to innovate and improve upon the standards. One of many, many causes was the higher price of Macintosh computers. That is why Mac floppy drives make sounds of different audible pitches as they move around the disk surface: the motor speed is changing! Īs of the emergence of high-density (HD) floppies in the early 1990s, Apple was growing weary of being slammed around in the marketplace. How did Apple do this? By using a variable-speed spindle drive system instead of fixed-speed, to cram more data on the same magnetic material space. Similarly, double-side double-density (DSDD or for our purposes DS) 3.5" floppies hold 720k on a Wintel, and 800k on a Mac. You may have noticed (or not) that long ago, when floppies were common, the original 3.5" single-side double-density (SSDD or for our purposes SS) hard-case floppies held something like 270k or 360k on PC-compatible computers (if they even used those… i didn’t and don’t know) while the same floppy formatted and used on a Mac held 400k. What is Not well-known is that these drives, being more generic, lack a crucial feature of Apple-specific floppy drives: Variable Speed. All the ones i have seen connect via USB. Below are the most common scenarios: 400k and/or 800k Floppies with an External USB Floppy DriveĪs is well documented, modern Macs from this millennium (and some before) no longer come with built-in floppy drives. “Hey! I’ve got a floppy drive on my Mac, and it reads some floppies just fine, yet not others. This page attempts to address methods and workarounds for accessing data on Macintosh floppy disks (using Apple Macintosh and clone hardware) and moving the desired data to newer Mac systems.
Working with Macintosh Floppy Disks in the New MillenniumĪs time passes and floppy disks become relics of computing’s past (especially in the Macintosh world), folks seem to be confronting more problems accessing information stored on this older format.
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