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 Teac FD235HF 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 and also to make them work in Double Density mode. 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 standard BBC disc drive power cable with special adapter 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.

The drives are High Density 1.44MB drives adapted to work only in double density mode. The BBC micro cannot understand drives operating in high density mode so this modification means that the drives always use double density mode whether double density (720K) or high density (1.44MB) discs are used. However, I must stress that it is not recommended to use HD discs in these drives as the double density recording mode used can lead to disc media deterioration and data unreliability with HD discs.

I supply these drives as the basic 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 casing as the existing drive casing offers sufficient protection from the drive internal workings.

Also in the picture on the left, you can see the special power adapter lead which allows a standard BBC disc drive power cable to be used with a 3½" drive.

I have a limited number of these drives available as they were quite a bit more expensive to buy in than the Sony drives. However, if there is sufficient demand for this type of drive, I will see about getting hold of some more.

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