Mon 10 Sep 2007
Before harddrives became standard equipment in personal computers it was popular to run two floppy drives on one computer. One floppy drive held the operating system while the other floppy could hold the application or work files, this way you did not have to swap floppies as much as if you would run a floppy-disk only system from one floppy drive.
Amiga can use four floppy drives at the same time, named DF0 to DF3, but the most popular configuration was to run a single external floppy drive as DF1 together with the internal DF0 drive.
The most important factors when buying an external floppy was to look for a drive with an On/Off button – so you could switch it off and save some memory, a pass through port (so you could add DF2 and DF3) and a dust cover (so dust would not collect inside the floppy drive).
This is the official extra floppy drive from Commodore. It matches the A500 nicely but lacks dust cover and pass-through (and is the only drive in this collection without these functions). It has a very short lead that I actually like because you typically keep the floppy drive close to the Amiga and wont need 0.5 meters of cable.
This is a drive by Ferrotec Peripherals, I think it is very ugly.
This is a two drives by Cumana, a popular company making all kind of hardware things for the Amiga. The casing is slightly shaped to make it stand out a bit. Booth of these drives has a handwritten label on the bottom, one is from 1991 and the other is from 1992.
This is you typical no-name 3.5 inch external 720KB floppy drive from the early 90’ies. Small and cool, does its job nicely.
This is probably the most popular no-name external floppy drive. I have seen loads of these during the years. And I think they are the best looking.
What a nice collection of vintage Amiga hardware!