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| So who makes floppy drive read/write heads? |
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| Stray Electron:
I don't think that any manufacturer has sold repair parts for floppy disks drives at least since the early 1980s. Even at about $300 each (in mid 1970s dollars), the drives were simply not worth repairing. It also took special alignment disks, special drive controllers, oscilloscopes and special training to align disk drives. Back in about 1977 I was repairing removable cartridge drives and I have never talked to anyone that has worked on disk drives professionally since that time frame. I was working for a large aerospace company in the early to mid 1990s when they threw out all of their disk drive parts, heads, alignment disks and the controllers. I rescued a lot of the stuff from the trash heap and still have some of it but I think that I eventually threw out the heads and other repair parts. |
| amyk:
I suspect some tiny factory in China is still making them in low volume, possibly alongside cassette and magstripe reader heads (the latter two being extremely similar). |
| tooki:
I doubt it. There’s practically no market for them (nobody is particularly nostalgic for floppy disks, even in retro computing), but above all, unlike with cassette decks (where cheap manufacturers existed alongside expensive name brands), during the floppy heyday, only major companies, mostly Japanese, made them (Sony, Matsushita, Teac, Mitsumi, NEC, Alps, Samsung, Epson, Citizen, etc). I’ve never heard of a true no-name floppy drive mechanism, so there would be no such company to continue manufacturing. Not saying they definitely didn’t exist, but I’ve never come across it. I suppose it’s possible a major company sold off its tooling when exiting the market, but who knows. As I said above: the number of 3rd party drives has been reduced to almost zero, they’re all the same item rebadged, with my suspicion being that they’re using up drive mechanisms bought in bulk. Floppy heads and cassette/magstripe heads are nothing alike. It’s unlikely there’s any real overlap in manufacturers. (And while cassette heads, especially good ones, are a niche product now, magstripe readers are still installed by the millions, even if only as backup for when the chip can’t be read.) |
| Jwalling:
--- Quote from: Stray Electron on August 31, 2022, 01:13:26 am --- I don't think that any manufacturer has sold repair parts for floppy disks drives at least since the early 1980s. Even at about $300 each (in mid 1970s dollars), the drives were simply not worth repairing. It also took special alignment disks, special drive controllers, oscilloscopes and special training to align disk drives. Back in about 1977 I was repairing removable cartridge drives and I have never talked to anyone that has worked on disk drives professionally since that time frame. --- End quote --- In the mid to late 1980's I did a lot of repair work and alignments on 8" Shugart floppy drives. Alignments were done with a special disk that made a "cats eye" waveform on a scope. The bolts holding the stepper motor were loosened and the motor turned till the cats eye was symmetrical. |
| Alex Eisenhut:
--- Quote from: tooki on August 31, 2022, 06:06:19 am ---(nobody is particularly nostalgic for floppy disks, even in retro computing),) --- End quote --- :box: |
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