» »Unlabelled » Atari SF314 & SF354 Floppy Drives

1:59 AM
2
Today I thought to share some important information about the Atari ST floppy drives, the SF314 and the SF354. For those who do not know, the Atari ST system has only ever had two external floppy drives available - the single-sided (360K) SF354 and the double-sided (720K) SF314 drives.



Whilst the 520ST+/STE/STF/STM/STFM and 1040 STE/STF/STFM series had built-in internal drives, the original 520ST and even 260ST units (sold in Europe mainly) did not have built-in drives so had to rely on an externally connected drive. This means that for users of the 520ST, the SF drives are a crucial part of the setup.



 
However with an upgrade of the internals it is possible for an original 520ST to run a double-sided SF314 drive and even a modern Gotek drive - but it will involve an upgrade of the TOS rom. Also most 520STF systems came equipped with single-sided drives but later versions had double-sided (720K) drives. For STE's is even possible to fit a 1.44MB floppy drive into the system. This requires a slight modification to both the floppy drive and cabling.

SF314 variants

The drives in the ST are manufactured mostly by Chinon and Epson, compared to Chinon, Alps and Panasonic for Commodore's Amiga. Whilst the SF354 only had one variant, a slanted slot single-sided specially-commissioned Chinon FZ-354 drive, there are up to 3 variants of the SF314 drive, the first older style with same slanted slot design as the SF354 and the last two newer ones having different power supplies with a more regular floppy slot design, but with one featuring a read/write LED on the bottom left, and the other on the top right..


As for power requirements, the older style casing requires a power supply that provides 5 and 12VDC and has a female connector. Later drives are 5VDC only and has a male connector. However a power supply from a 600XL, 800XL, 65XE, 130XE or an XE Game System will work with these perfectly fine.

More info on the Atari SF series:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36093/Atari-SF314-Disk-Drive/
Posted by at 1:59 AM

2 comments:

  1. PetariDecember 20, 2019 at 12:58 AM

    Sorry dude, but you write some wrong claims. Any 520 ST can work with DS floppy drives.
    For HD, most important mod is on motherboard - giving 16 MHz clock to FDC chip instead 8. And may need to replace it, if can not work at that clock rate. Ah, and all it is even simpler in some ST. I did it in 1990.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MattuSeptember 28, 2020 at 6:54 AM

    I have an SF354 that looks like the non-slanted SF314 and has an epson single sided floppy. So, thats at least 2 variants of the SF354.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)