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#1 |
Amigacionado!
![]() Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: Alford, England
Posts: 18
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Hi all,
Sorry if this seems like a bit of a silly question but I am just getting back into the Amiga and need some advice on floppy disks. Although I have pretty much all the games I want installed on a CF card I still need to get hold of some floppy disks for the purposes of save games and writing a few ADFs back on to with the Amiga and ADF2disk (or one of those programs). I have been reading that using 1.44meg HD floppies will lead to corruption evenutally if I format them for the Amiga but notice that standard Amiga floppies claim to only be 720kb rather than the 880kbs I seem to remember. So where would you buy floppy disks if you needed some? Thanks! |
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#2 |
Registered User
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Posts: 1,055
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Double density floppies have a raw capacity of 1MB. The usable capacity once formatted then depends on the file system, for DOS/Windows it's 720kB and for the Amiga 880kB. Equivalently for high density floppies it's 2MB raw, 1.44MB DOS and 1.76MB Amiga.
New double density floppies are getting hard to come by. You can easily find old, used ones on eBay or just by asking around on any Amiga forum such as this one. You can also use high density floppies, they work well enough for at least a while, even though they aren't really intended for double density drives (different kind of magnetic material). |
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#3 |
Amigacionado!
![]() Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: Alford, England
Posts: 18
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Thanks!
Thank you ajk
![]() That clears up my query about the storage capacity nicely - I couldn't find that DDs had a potential of up to 1meg anywhere so that is really helpful. Now to try and find some decent floppies ![]() |
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#4 |
Registered User
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Liverpool
Posts: 879
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If you are ever passing through Liverpool
I have a Box of 18 you can have. |
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#5 |
Registered User
![]() Join Date: May 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 19,045
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Don't even bother trying to make HD floppies work, they will be a headache down the road.
Recycled 2SDD floppies will work much better on an Amiga than new HD floppies. |
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#6 |
Amigacionado!
![]() Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: Alford, England
Posts: 18
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#7 |
Amigacionado!
![]() Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: Alford, England
Posts: 18
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Thanks Akira - definitely going to stick to DDs especially as my save game info will be on there and i don't fancy losing 12+ seasons of SWOS!
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#8 |
Registered User
![]() Join Date: May 2017
Location: Belfast
Posts: 96
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Keep an eye on ebay and gumtree. I recently got a box of 120 disks along with a nice external floppy drive for £25. All the disks so far still work fine compared to my own disk that have all but died. I think storage is the key to be honest. My disks all ended up in my parents roof space and with years of cold and damp they have literally grown mold.
Another option is to get yourself a gotek drive and a usb pen. That can hold 999 floppies and its just a buttons press to swap disks. I do find though that over 10 floppies and I need to start writing down what each number corresponds to lol (part of the joy of being an aging amiga owner, its memory is fine, mine not so much). I actually took the floppy out my newly acquired external drive and put that in the 1200. Then took my gotek and put that in the external enclosure. Just makes life so much easier! |
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#9 |
Registered User
![]() Join Date: Feb 2014
Location: Germany
Posts: 350
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I perfer the original - a HxC
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#10 |
Registered User
![]() Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: England
Posts: 120
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Does your Amiga have a modified HD drive or is it a real DD drive? I know that the one in my A1200 is a modified HD drive (Panasonic) so I'll bet the HD disks will work better in those than the true DD drives. I know I've never had issues over the years with HD disks in this drive (besides having to put a piece of tape over the hole of course to make them work as DD).
Also, don't forget diskspare device on the amiga which you can download from aminet. This allows you to format DD disks to 984 K and HD disks to 1968 K (a true amiga HD drive required to format at 1968 K). http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/Diskspr3 |
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#11 |
Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Stockholm
Posts: 3,307
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#12 |
Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Birmingham
Age: 32
Posts: 340
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companies should just start making them again. fools for stopping!
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