With new 5¼" drives being impossible to obtain, and second hand 5¼" drives and discs becoming ever more scarce, I decided to invest in some brand-new 3½" floppy disc drives so I can provide drives to Beeb users on an ongoing basis in the future.

So if you've pulled out that floppy drive from your old PC, only to find that you can't get the right bits for the power cable, or disc errors abound when connecting it up to your BBC, then stop struggling! BeebMaster has done all the hard work for you!

These are brand-new Sony MPF920 3½" floppy disc drives. I have made a hardware modification to the drives to make them work correctly as Drive 0 when connected up to a BBC micro. The drives are supplied and fitted with a correctly made-up 34-way ribbon cable for connecting to the disc drive port underneath your Beeb, as well as a power cable for plugging into the auxilary power supply of the BBC.

These drives are suitable for use with BBC Master series machines as well as BBC Model B and B+ computers with a 1770 disc interface. Unfortunately they are not guaranteed to work with BBC micros with the 8271 disc interface as the older disc controller experiences timing problems when using 3½" disc drives.

A modification to the BBC Model B DFS which solves many of the problems experienced when using the 8271 controller with 3½" disc drives is available widely on the internet and I will supply a DNFS 1.21 ROM to anyone intending to use these drives with an 8271 BBC B - just ask when ordering!

The drives are High Density 1.44MB drives with automatic density detection. This means that the drives will work correctly with Double Density (720K) floppy discs but will not work on the BBC with High Density (1.44MB) discs as the data transfer rate associated with HD discs is too fast for the BBC to understand.

I supply these units as the drive itself with data ribbon cable and auxilary power cable. They are not supplied with any additional casing, but as you can see from the pictures, they can be used without the need to be mounted inside any other housing as the existing drive casing offers sufficient protection from the drive internal workings.

These drives are now supplied and fitted with a bespoke power cable which can be seen in this picture. This cable connects to the BBC's auxiliary power connector and supersedes the modular cable supplied previously.

For all enquiries, please contact me at Enquiries@BeebShop.co.uk

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