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Author Topic: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?  (Read 3147 times)

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Offline B00tDiskTopic starter

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A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« on: November 17, 2010, 12:08:24 AM »
From here :

Quote

Commodore International has selected the Insite Floptical drive for use in its Amiga 3000. There is some competition in the large-capacity, small-format area. The 2.88MB drive has been on the market for some time but has been impeded by high disk and equipment costs in return for only a twofold increase in capacity.
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Offline Tension

Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2010, 12:16:30 AM »
Hmmmm...

Never heard of that type of drive...

Sounds like an early version of the LS-120 drive to me, but they were 120MB.
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Offline Iggy

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2010, 12:21:10 AM »
Quote from: B00tDisk;592330
From here :


Yes, I remember these. The company started using this technology on 5.25 drives and I believe they eventually applied it to 3.5.
Year ago I bought one of the 5.25 as they were being liquidated. I never got it to work with any of the controllers I had though.
Really dead technology.
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Offline JimS

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2010, 02:42:07 AM »
Not as a built in drive, but I did see one used as an external drive on a 3000. If I recall, the guy was not particularly satisfied with it.
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Offline Matt_H

Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2010, 04:03:07 AM »
@ B00tDisk

I think that passage about the 2.88MB drive is referring to those drives in general, not necessarily in regards to the 3000. It's not very well written.

The Insite drive they also refer to did get some Amiga support: http://aminet.net/search?query=floptical
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Offline hardlink

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #5 on: November 17, 2010, 05:23:35 PM »
Quote from: JimS;592352
Not as a built in drive, but I did see one used as an external drive on a 3000.


I have the internal version of one of these drives, and I'm not sure it would even fit in a A3000D case. It was shipped on most SGI Indy pizza-boxes, back during their Jurassic Park glory days.  We used them a lot at work to transfer files on floppy to/from the SGI's, and were very happy with them until they burned out, but we never had or used the optical media. I got one in an Indy picked up, with a brand new pack of 3 optical disks!, but I have not tried the opticals yet since I only have that one drive  that can read or write  them.
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Offline joekster

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #6 on: November 17, 2010, 05:59:01 PM »
I remember these being scsi... They should work in an a3000, but would look more like a syquest than a floppy...
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Offline Terse

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #7 on: July 25, 2012, 07:07:03 AM »
Updating this old thread.

I had an Insite Flopticall in my Amiga 3000.  It interfaced using the SCSI bus but using a custom mountlist entry, it would easily read MS-DOS 1.44mb disks.

It was very unreliable, but the kit I'd gotten was specific for the Amiga 3000, so it more or less fit and could be used as the second drive.
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Offline Motormouth

Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #8 on: July 28, 2012, 02:46:52 AM »
I did not own one, but I saw one in action.  The disks were 21 meg, and like Terse said could read MS-DOS HD disks.  However they were as slow as molasses in January (well at least in the northern hemisphere.)  basically not much faster than a floppy.
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Offline bbond007

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #9 on: July 28, 2012, 03:32:40 AM »
Quote from: B00tDisk;592330
From here :


I know NeXT had a magneto-optical drive. Perhaps it was something like that.
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Offline matt3k

Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #10 on: July 28, 2012, 05:52:20 AM »
An Amiga 3000 Internal 3.5 Floptical was in production but never released due to production issues.

I spoke to the manufacturer when they were in production.   It was produced but never released as large production runs.  They never achieved the performance and reliability to warrant mass production and acceptance.    

I almost was able to purchase one from the manufacturer back in the day, to bad it didn't work out...
« Last Edit: July 28, 2012, 06:04:29 AM by matt3k »
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Offline ncafferkey

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #11 on: July 28, 2012, 10:14:14 AM »
Quote from: bbond007;701400
I know NeXT had a magneto-optical drive. Perhaps it was something like that.


It seems the two technologies are opposites in a way. MO is an a optical medium aided by magnetism for writing, whereas the Floptical is a magnetic medium aided by optical tracking. Another opposite is that MO is very reliable.
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Offline Zac67

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2012, 10:26:23 AM »
Very close. MO is a magnetic storage that's written to laser (heat) assisted and read optically - reliable but slow when writing. Floptical is just as you said. It never took off as it wasn't cheap and not very reliable. Then CD-Rs came into fashion, very quickly displacing everything else.
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Offline ChaosLord

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #13 on: July 28, 2012, 03:30:20 PM »
I had (still have) an LS-120 floptical in my A1200.

I also got a Ricoh Magneto Optical drive for my A3000 around 1990 which cost me $5000.00 with all the disks totalling over 8GB in storage, which was like 7.5GB more than the largest Amiga BBS I knew of at the time :D
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Offline bbond007

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Re: A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?
« Reply #14 on: July 28, 2012, 03:46:52 PM »
Quote from: ncafferkey;701416
It seems the two technologies are opposites in a way. MO is an a optical medium aided by magnetism for writing, whereas the Floptical is a magnetic medium aided by optical tracking. Another opposite is that MO is very reliable.


Interesting... I never knew the difference.

Quote from: ChaosLord;701429
I had (still have) an LS-120 floptical in my A1200.

I also got a Ricoh Magneto Optical drive for my A3000 around 1990 which cost me $5000.00 with all the disks totalling over 8GB in storage, which was like 7.5GB more than the largest Amiga BBS I knew of at the time :D


I did have my BBS running on OS/2 machine. I had a bunch of (used) Microscience 85MB MFM drives (retired from Novell Netware servers). I formatted them to 120MB using RLL controller. I added a secondary RLL controller. I remember having to change the default base address and cut the trace for the IRQ on the secondary controller.
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