The disks were incredibly cheap and nasty and many were missing the shutter, with inevitably hilarious results involving sand. They were used on a few other systems, including Smith-Corona typewriters. Not so great for putting a filesystem on, but perfectly adequate if you're going to read the entire disk contents into RAM. You can rewrite individual sectors but the head always has to traverse the entire disk. From the FDC side of things they have a single track with lots of sectors. When the head reaches the centre of the disk a spring returns it to the outside. They're not random access there's a single spiral track, record-like, with the head in the drive being moved by a cam connected to the single drive motor.
I briefly had someone interesting in adding Flu圎ngine support for it so that they could be read and written from normal PCs but haven't heard back from them. This probably means that the read-heads are out of alignment.Ooh, Mitsumi Quick Disk! I've seen one of these in the wild exactly once, but not operating. I then wrote another textfile to the floppy and tried to read it on the 365E but the machine could only see the actual file that itself created in the first step. I then took this same floppy and used it on another machine and to my dismay i saw that the new machine could not actually see my newly created text-file (from the 365E). One odd thing that i noticed was that the newly formatted floppy reported back 1,1MB available (where it should really be closer to 1,4). Now i was able to create files and reading them back worked. But the motor itself is not spinning and instead becomes very hot after trying to access a disk for a minute. The rubber band on one of the motors needs to be replaced. I then used an unused floppy and retried it and this time it actually formatted the whole thing properly. I've got an old word processor that contains a Mitsumi Quick Disk drive that isn't working. Would it work? I grabbed one of my floppies off the shelf and tried to format it - it gave me a message that track 0 was bad. I got the small package home and took the drive apart again, mounting the new belt. Taking into account that it most probably had stretched during its life (and dried out quite a bit), i assumed that the correct specs would be:Īnd so i found a nice shop on Ebay who had one that could fit according to the potential measurements (sold as new for a Matsushita EME-279TC unit).
I measured the old belt using my digital caliper and found that it was 1.45mm wide, 0.48mm thick and ~22.4cm long. I could hear the drive ticking inside the machine, but it surely was not reading any disks. PCB with Protruding connector is IBM, the other is Mitsumi.Īnd i tried it out. So i got to work, effectively swapping out the guts of the Mitsumi unit, putting the IBM unit contents in there Internally, the connector is stuck to this small control-board and i suspected that it might be worthwhile to source a standard Mitsumi D353F2 unit and then swap these boards between them? Would it work? What did i have to loose (you guessed right. Naturally, IBM did not seem to just use a bog standard Mitsumi unit because in the IBM branded version, the connector is of the protruding kind with pins (which then "snapped" to the laptop) while the standard unit has this flat-cable connector.
#Mitsumi quick disk drive belt serial
It is connected to the serial bus via a 6-pin DIN cable to the Commodore 64. What the Mitsumi original unit looks like:Īnd here is what the IBM branded unit looks like: The Commodore 1541 or CBM-1541 (early models: VIC-1541 or - Germany only - VC-1541) is a floppy disk drive which uses 5.25' disks.All 1541 models use a single density drive mechanism with a single read/write head. Googling for that comes up with nothing, but lo and behold, apparently Mitsumi has a model just called "D353F2" (googling for this will give quite many hits). I immediately started to search for the various FRUs given by this page:īut failed miserably to source a replacement unit (they are rarer than hens teeth).įast forward to the current time and i took a closer look on the drive and i noticed the Mitsumi stamp on it - the unit is actually manufactured by Mitsumi and (in the IBM shroud) the model is called "D353FE2". Revival of a 365E floppy drive unit - Part 1Ībout 2 year ago while i was trying to replace the belt on the Thinkpad 365E slim floppy unit (IBM calls them FRU 41H8387/41H7444 depending on if they are internal or external in a case) i unfortunately snapped one of the read-heads off (due to temporary "sausage fingers" :) ).
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