what made you buy an external drive?

[dirkies]

Curious question
Me personally was to play disk swapping games like Rocket Ranger play at ease, although my first noisy A1010 broke down in a week! The replacement was quieter and never failed since.
Other reasons were faster copying at copyparties, and the SCA Miami Vice demo. When I bought a 5-1/4 drive to save on floppy costs, the mandatory hardware boot switch was installed on my A500.
So what about you lads?

[s2325]

My external drive was Roctec. I was worried that there was something wrong because led was off after connecting to Amiga Drive was more silent than internal, copying with X-Copy was much faster. I liked Street Fighter II and second drive was helpful - game was on 4 disks.

[demolition]

I never had an external disk drive back in the day, as I had practically no money back then. My A500+ also only had 1MB RAM, so I used D-Copy which could copy a full floppy without switching multiple times (the X-Copy I had could not).

I bought my first external drive last year since I always wanted one (and now I have money for it), but must admit that I have never really used it for much.

[prowler]

I bought a Cumana external 3½-inch drive for my Escom AT1200 because the internal floppy drive had been giving read errors from new and I could not be certain whether the drive or the disks were at fault (I was an Amiga n00b at the time ).

It was the drive which had been faulty; all the disks read perfectly in the Cumana (I had been trying to create ADF files from the disks for use in emulation). That was ten years ago and that Cumana drive is still one of the best Amiga floppy drives I have.

I bought the Escom machine from Eyetech, whose customer support was notoriously bad, so decided it wasn't worth it to pursue with them the matter of the bad floppy drive.

(I recently purchased a couple of replacement internal floppy drives for my Commodore and Escom A1200s, but haven't yet got around to modifying the AT1200 motherboard to accept the drive.)

[lost_loven]

Pretty sure it was Dragons Lair made me buy a 2nd disk drive..


Lost

[zipper]

To get rid of disk swapping when doing something that needed Workbench files. Soon a 2nd drive was added.

[Predseda]

Dune 2.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by s2325

My external drive was Roctec. I was worried that there was something wrong because led was off after connecting to Amiga Drive was more silent than internal, copying with X-Copy was much faster. I liked Street Fighter II and second drive was helpful - game was on 4 disks.

Yes, the Roctec was a very good drive as my mate delighted in telling the two of us who owned Cumana drives! Aside from the metal construction and slimness, the speed it honed in on tracks with X-Copy was one of the things he went on about. Still, the Cumana never really let me down!

[roy bates]

i got one to play monkey island 1 and 2 and fate of atlantis mainly.

but it was for the other multi disk games as well before i got a harddrive.

[dirkies]

I remember Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon which became a much more cool experience (actually virtually all Cinemaware games, as most were quite frequent swappers)
However was disappointed some 2 disk games refused to accept a DF1 drive and kept stubbornly asking for disk 2 in DF0 only (rare to find trackdisk games which took into account a 2nd drive).
And of course it made life a lot easier for hacking and productivity, it increased the lifetime of the internal drive and eject button due to less swapping.
back in the days a HDD was way too expensive for me, and my A501 expansion gave me a RAD drive but not big enough to fit a full floppy in it.
when I got my A4000 a HDD and 2x1.76 floppies were immediately part of the package, although I must also admit I did not use as intensely my DF1 in my A4000 as I did with the ext on the A500. Instead I copied those Cinemaware games onto HDD (or even in RAM!) and after some fiddling they ran great, sometimes too fast as Cinemaware used the disk swap request delays to time the conversations (eg in Sinbad), and when you ran the game from HDD or even RAD it would result in the conversations disappearing so fast as the next scene starting. Always bugged me on that one
For the moment I still have the A1010 (!), an ext 3 1/2 Cumana (very good ones indeed), a noname ext 5 1/4 drive (faulty me thinks) and lost another 5 1/4 drive (prob lend it to someone and forgot to ask it back!). Also have a spare new original internal A500 Commodore drive (original one from 1988 started to get very noisy) and last but not least the 2xFDD Kryoflux and the USB and SD editions of the Lotharek "drives".
Enough removable storage for my A500

[laffer]

I bought one to avoid all the floppy switching, I was very much into adventure games and they came on a ton of floppies sometimes.

I also got it to make it easier to.... ehem, make backups!

I remember external floppy drives were pretty cheap... back then, I found it extremely cheap as I was used to the price of the C64 floppy drive... which I could never afford (was more expensive than the C64 itself, at least later on!).

[John Pillow]

Had a A1010 external floppy disk drive for a while, can't remember if it was because of Monkey Island or Dragon's Lair, and then "of course" used it extensively with good old X-Copy ("maraude it professional"!)… A few months later a friend of mine wanted to swap his A2000 for my A500 + drive, quite the deal :-)

[DDNI]

Pirating games.

[quahappy]

Once games started having more than one disk and disk-swapping started to get on my ti... nerves, that's when I invested in the Cumana 3.5" External Disk Drive which had never let me down. Can't recall the year. Must admit the external DD was invaluable during my AMOS programming days.

[fryguy]

I bought it mostly to able copy games faster. I first bought 512kb extraram which made the copying faster, but an external floppy made it even faster.
Also remember that Wings was more enjoyable with two drives.

[lost_loven]

Another couple games that drove me nuts for swapping was rocket ranger and roger rabbit... swap 10 times to play 30 sec's and die and then another 10 swaps! (felt like it anyhow lol ) .. Remember also buying the commodore 512k up grade just to play dungeon master 1 meg version at the time. Then came falcon! opps k off topic.

lost

[TjLaZer]

Yes those crazy annoying games that needed an insane amount of disk swaps!! OMG it was sooo nice to get that 2nd drive!!

I had a A1010 and later got a California Access CA-880. It was my favorite drive, I have two of them today, my original from 1988 and one I got on eBay several years ago!

[Djay]

X-Copy

First one I bought was a Cumana and have I stuck with the brand ever since

[Retro1234]

Games - copying and playing
But useful for apps as well

Originally Posted by s2325

I liked Street Fighter II and second drive was helpful - game was on 4 disks.

This is when Floppys had realy reached there end
Although you could backup superior SNES or MD version on 2 Disks - Ok maybe not fair comparison but................

[Rob 1]

I have to agree with most of you guys making "back ups"

Games wise there are certain games aren't there where you would need to swap and swap back again. I think most of these games I played were Cinemaware games Wings, ICFTD etc....

Has anyone ever asked the similar question...

Why did you first upgrade to 1mb?

(I suppose you have to be a bit older for that question)