The Commodore SFD 1001 floppy disk drive is an interesting beast. It looks like a 1541, but it’s not. To start with, it’s an IEEE-488 drive, which means that it was aimed at the Commodore PET/CBM rather than at the Vic/C64/C128 market. It also means that it’s a parallel drive, and so around 8-10 times faster than the serial IEC drives that followed it.
The Commodore SFD 1001 is part of the 8050/8250 family. Think of it as the single drive version of an 8250LP. That means it is a double sided drive with a formatted capacity of 1 megabyte (500K per side). And the later 1541 drive for “home” users only supported 170K! The disks are read/write compatible with the 8250, and it can switch to “single sided” mode to use 8050 formatted disks. It can’t read 4040/1541 disks even though they are physically the same media. The track spacings are completely different. Like all Commodore drives, it can’t handle HD media.
I bought this drive from an eBay seller as “untested”. It has a US 115-volt power supply so I have to hope that nobody has plugged it into the UK 230 volt mains. On unboxing it I was immediately intrigued: it has a “Precision Software” sticker on the side. And why is that significant? I used to work for Precision Software in the late 80s and early 90s. And while I was concerned with 16-bit software for Amigas and Ataris and PCs, I was certainly aware of lots of 8-bit stuff around the place. So I might have come into contact with this drive back in the day.
There’s a lot of work to do on this drive before we can even switch it on. It’ll need a UK power supply – A Mean Well RD-50A should fit the bill nicely. I got one from here: https://www.powersuppliesonline.co.uk/rd-50a-54w-dual-output-enclosed-power-supply.html (not an affiliate link), plus we’ll need to check the drive motor PCB for capacitor leakage. These drives (and the bigger brother 8250) are notorious for it.
And there are signs of rust on the connectors at the back. So I think we have got our work cut out for us.
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