General > General Technical Chat
So who makes floppy drive read/write heads?
Alex Eisenhut:
--- Quote from: Jwalling on August 31, 2022, 08:40:04 am ---
--- 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.
--- End quote ---
I had a very small business as a high school student aligning Commodore 1541s that constantly knock themselves out of alignment in normal use...
The thing that is bothering me is the failure of the R/W head in Newtronics/Mitsumi mechanisms, which apparently rarely, if ever, happens to the Alps mechanism.
Pretty much all 1541-style drives with the Newtronics lever mechanism have r/w head failures. Third party drives, all 1541-IIs, probably the 2031LP, etc.
I wanted to know how floppy disk r/w heads are made, what materials are used, the polishing, the gap in the head, etc, so that I could understand why that particular brand fails, and what to do about it. It seems to fail by itself over time.
The only information I found was in a textbook about tribology which merely states that the manufacturing process is complex. :-//
And patents all the way back to the late 1960s IIRC.
edit: 1551 also a "syndrome" drive
Alex Eisenhut:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/08/31/1742211/japan-declares-war-on-the-humble-floppy-disk-in-new-digitization-push
nctnico:
I just noticed the same news article :-DD
Alex Eisenhut:
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