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NEEDED: 3.5" floppy drive alignment

H

HopToIt

Member
Joined
Apr 17, 2013
Messages
19
Location
Portland, OR
Looking for someone with the proper analysis disk and equipment to verify/align 3.5" floppy drives. It's getting tiresome to guess whether or not my working drives are still properly aligned. It's the same thing when getting a used replacement drive off of fleabay.

Requirements:
> receive and send working 3.5" drives by mail
> has necessary analog alignment disk and testing equipment
> able to make drive adjustments indicated by testing

Please PM quote for doing the service or any leads if you know someone to contact about it.
 
Maybe I am projecting ahead for when NOS drives won't be around anymore. But I'd like to get a sense what alignment servicing would cost now.
 
I can endorse looking after rare drives, such as a Y-E Data YD-685, or one of the NEC 3.5" drives with an internal data separator. One of the old Sony 600 RPM dives (OA32?) would be worth hanging onto. Certainly specialty drives, such as 3M Superdrives or a Caleb UHD-144 are valuable because they're the only ones that can read media recorded with them.

But a lot of 3.5" drives are worth their scrap metal value.
 
On decent IBM PC drives, alignment is probably one of the last things to worry about. Over time you are more likely to run in to other problems first. Physical head damage, worn motors, leaking electrolytic capacitors, rust, static electricity zapping semiconductors, etc. If you are concerned about having floppy drives to use in the future, stock up on good quality drives (Teac, Fujitsu "Copal", etc) and keep them stored in a cool dry environment. That will help protect you against "alignment" issues as well as all of the other above problems.
 
And get a disk drive head cleaning kit. Bad disks cause far more drive problems than *any* electrical or alignment issues.
 
SomeGuy said:
On decent IBM PC drives, alignment is probably one of the last things to worry about. Over time you are more likely to run in to other problems first. Physical head damage, worn motors, leaking electrolytic capacitors, rust, static electricity zapping semiconductors, etc. If you are concerned about having floppy drives to use in the future, stock up on good quality drives (Teac, Fujitsu "Copal", etc) and keep them stored in a cool dry environment. That will help protect you against "alignment" issues as well as all of the other above problems.
Click to expand...

I can't recall the last 3.5" drive that I saw with alignment issues. Dirty heads--sure, lots of times.
 
How I got to thinking about alignment was an old 3.5" floppy that appeared to be completely unreadable, even on a new Sony MPF-920e that I bought. But on a hunch, I unearthed a long neglected Mitsumi drive that I guessed had originally been used to write that floppy. Without fuss, the Mitsumi was able to read from that floppy and recover it's contents. Yet that drive could no longer reliably read commercial floppies. Made me wonder how long had I been using that old drive not knowing it wasn't calibrated properly.

Bugs me that there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to verify whether a functioning drive is still in good shape or not, short of getting a reference disk and oscilloscope. Suppose I'm a minimalist when it comes to equipment and would rather see hardware maintained versus building a heap of extra drives. I also still move around so much that it's always a battle to adopt more gear.
 
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