Thread

Floppy port limit?

68kMLA · Hardware · 10 posts · Mar 6, 2010 — Mar 8, 2010 View original thread ↗

#1 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 - 04:29 68kMLA

Lessay you are daisychaining floppy drives to the floppy port on your IIci. What is the maximum amount of drives you could possible daisychain?

#2 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 - 05:00 68kMLA

I don't believe you can daisy chain floppy drives on the Mac. Like the eject button, the daisy chain port was included for the Apple II line. At one point Apple wanted a universal floppy drive that would work on both a Mac and an Apple II. Apple likely could have made the daisy chain port work on the Mac but by the time the daisy chainable drives came out, Macs were moving to hard drives so there wasn't a real reason to modify the Mac ROMs

#3 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 - 13:54 68kMLA

Yep, you're correct. The max number of drives you can get on a Mac is three. Two internal (SE only?) and one external.

Tempest

#4 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 - 20:08 68kMLA

Yep, you're correct. The max number of drives you can get on a Mac is three. Two internal (SE only?) and one external.
Tempest

The SE, the LC, the full-size IIs (II, IIx, IIfx,) and the Portable can all take two floppy drives internally. However, of those, only the SE and Portable also have an external floppy port.

#5 Sun, 7 Mar 2010 - 09:07 68kMLA

I believe it was possible to daisy chain a Hard Disk 20 with a floppy drive. On just the right Mac, you could maybe hook up 4 floppy "devices".

Unless you can chain multiple hard disk 20s. WOW that would be cool. I have not seen that before.

#6 Sun, 7 Mar 2010 - 19:42 68kMLA

The Mac II had an external 5.25" floppy drive option, which uses a NuBus card. So a Mac II can have 3 with that option. I'm not sure what happens if you try to hook up more than one of those.

#7 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 - 02:07 68kMLA

I don't even think you can - I don't think the Apple PC 5.25" drive has a port for daisy chaining, does it?

#8 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 - 02:14 68kMLA

If you really wanted to go nuts, you could go for a Macintosh LC with two internal floppies, plus an Apple IIe card connected to two external floppies...

But I think the best you can do for Mac OS-accessible would be an SE with two internal and one external, plus the PC 5.25" drive, for four Mac OS-accessible drives. (One of them a 360 KB PC drive.)

#9 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 - 03:21 68kMLA

Yep, you're correct. The max number of drives you can get on a Mac is three. Two internal (SE only?) and one external.

Pardon my vague memory, but does anyone know if this is actually supported or just a theoretical, physical maximum? I seem to remember that only two devices at a time are physically supported by the controller in the Mac.

However, I could definitely be wrong about this.

#10 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 - 04:28 68kMLA

I don't even think you can - I don't think the Apple PC 5.25" drive has a port for daisy chaining, does it?

The Mac II has lots of NuBus slots, so I was talking more along the lines of installing a plethora of those cards and attaching a 5.25" drive to each.

Pardon my vague memory, but does anyone know if this is actually supported or just a theoretical, physical maximum? I seem to remember that only two devices at a time are physically supported by the controller in the Mac.

That seems possible. There are only eject keystrokes for 2 normal floppy drives.

⌘⇧1 - Eject With Ghost Drive 1

⌘⇧2 - Eject With Ghost Drive 2

⌘⇧3 - Screenshot!

BTW neat trick most of us know - when it asks for a disk to be reinserted and you can't for some reason, hit ⌘+period a bunch of times.