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IBM Portable (5155) Noisy FDD

pearce_jj

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Good morning

I wondered if anyone had any suggestions or information about 'servicing' a 5.25" FDD as fitted to the above machine? Drive A is very noisy but drive B is lovely and quiet, obviously it would be nice for them both to operate quietly.

Cheers
 
Hi, yes it might help I suppose :)

They are qumetrack 142 drives. They both work OK but there is a lot of seek noisy on one drive, where the other is very quiet.
 
Screws all tight and rails cleaned with switchlube. Drive still noisy just the same so I guess it's just wear on the head 'sledge' or the stepper motor perhaps. But whatever, it's still working fine anyway.

Of the two drives fitted to my 5155, one has a Beckman 899-3-R150 resistor network fitted to a DIL socket (with one completely bent pin) and the other doesn't have the chip at all. So I guess they were quite a 'robust' design?

Anyway general info on the drive with a couple of photos on my own wiki:
http://vintage-blog.peacon.co.uk/wiki/QumeTrak_142_5¼-inch_Floppy_Disk_Drive

Many thanks
 
The 150 ohm terminator resistor is installed correctly. When you have more than one drive on a cable, only the last drive gets the terminator (remind you of SCSI?).

Just curious if the noisy drive is the A: drive. If so, it could certainly be wear.

The bit on the Wiki about the drive not having any "outer casing" is puzzling. Few 5.25" drives had such thing. I have a couple of 142s as well. Not my favorite half-neight drive (Teac FD55), but okay.
 
Thanks, I've corrected/explained that. Also thanks for the info about the terminator. Presumably then all pins should be in contact then - still it works as it is anyway!

And yes indeed it's the drive A.
 
The way the terminators on these drives work is that all lines of the floppy interface are open-collector drive. If you look on the floppy controller and drive PCBs, you'll probably see some 7438 open-collector NAND buffers. These have a maximum drive capability of 48 ma at 5v. Your terminators are 150 ohm pullups.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the output transistor in a 7438 drops about a volt. So you have 4V into 150 ohms for a drive set with a single terminator or 75 ohms if two terminators are used. The current used respectively is about 27 or 53 ma, the latter being somewhat higher than the rated current for the 7438 drivers. Not fatal, but unnecessarily hard on the IC. Best to terminate as per standard practice and leave just one terminator installed. You could even safely use a 470 ohm terminator and it wouldn't affect a thing, given the drive cable length.

Later floppies use LS-series TTL or CMOS logic and use much higher (2K) pullups which can be left permanently installed. The original 150 ohm terminator value was inherited from the 8" drive standards that could employ long cables (look at the number of old systems with external 8" drives). That's not the case here.
 
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