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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a> (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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And there are signs of rust on the connectors at the back. So I think we have got our work cut out for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n