oz390gta

I have recently acquired an AE HD+ 3.5" drive. When plugged into my
IIgs it acts quite happily as an 800k drive. My understanding is that
the drive can act as a 1.6MB drive. I have installed the AE GS/OS
software for this but I see no way of formatting a disk as 1.6MB. This
is more a curiosity than a necessity, but would be interested to hear
from anyone with experience with this drive. The major advantage of
the drive so far is that my IIgs has always clicked continuously when
in GS/OS with the Apple 3.5 drive attached, it does not do this with
the AE drive.

Anyone know anything about this drive?

oz390gta

Steven Hirsch

On 09/04/2010 05:11 AM, oz390gta wrote:
> I have recently acquired an AE HD+ 3.5" drive. When plugged into my
> IIgs it acts quite happily as an 800k drive. My understanding is that
> the drive can act as a 1.6MB drive. I have installed the AE GS/OS
> software for this but I see no way of formatting a disk as 1.6MB. This
> is more a curiosity than a necessity, but would be interested to hear
> from anyone with experience with this drive. The major advantage of
> the drive so far is that my IIgs has always clicked continuously when
> in GS/OS with the Apple 3.5 drive attached, it does not do this with
> the AE drive.

I believe you need an Apple SuperDrive controller (or the AE equivalent
perhaps) in order to get higher storage capacity. The drive itself is not
going to do what you are asking.

A2Aviator

You need a device driver installed for that to function, the device
driver effectively turns the drive into an Extended SmartPort device
similar to how the Floptical 20 meg drive worked. The problem is
compatibility. Disks formatted on that are only good on that, when the
higher capacity modes are used.

Wayne Stewart

AE made a number of different 3.5" drives. I have one of the AE 1.6mb
drives, AE 800k drives and one of the AE Macintosh HD drives. They're
packed away so I can't check the markings on them. I may well be wrong
but it seems to me that the IIGS 1.6mb drives were marked AEHD and the
Mac ones were HD+. The Mac one was meant to connect to an early Mac
that only had 800k drives and with a special driver r/w 1.4mb disks on
their drive.

With the installed GSOS driver I was able to format 1.6mb floppies. I
only used it briefly as having only the single drive I worried that
should the drive fail, I'd have a pile of unreadable floppies. Also
having a superdrive card pretty much eliminated any need for it.

Steven Hirsch

On 09/04/2010 11:58 AM, Wayne Stewart wrote:
> AE made a number of different 3.5" drives. I have one of the AE 1.6mb
> drives, AE 800k drives and one of the AE Macintosh HD drives. They're
> packed away so I can't check the markings on them. I may well be wrong
> but it seems to me that the IIGS 1.6mb drives were marked AEHD and the
> Mac ones were HD+. The Mac one was meant to connect to an early Mac
> that only had 800k drives and with a special driver r/w 1.4mb disks on
> their drive.
>
> With the installed GSOS driver I was able to format 1.6mb floppies. I
> only used it briefly as having only the single drive I worried that
> should the drive fail, I'd have a pile of unreadable floppies. Also
> having a superdrive card pretty much eliminated any need for it.

The AE 1.6mb drive could do extended density using the built-in GS controller?
Didn't realize that.

oz390gta

On Sep 5, 7:09*am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 09/04/2010 11:58 AM, Wayne Stewart wrote:
>
> > AE made a number of different 3.5" drives. I have one of the AE 1.6mb
> > drives, AE 800k drives and one of the AE Macintosh HD drives. They're
> > packed away so I can't check the markings on them. I may well be wrong
> > but it seems to me that the IIGS 1.6mb drives were marked AEHD and the
> > Mac ones were HD+. The Mac one was meant to connect to an early Mac
> > that only had 800k drives and with a special driver r/w 1.4mb disks on
> > their drive.
>
> > With the installed GSOS driver I was able to format 1.6mb floppies. I
> > only used it briefly as having only the single drive I worried that
> > should the drive fail, I'd have a pile of unreadable floppies. Also
> > having a superdrive card pretty much eliminated any need for it.
>
> The AE 1.6mb drive could do extended density using the built-in GS controller?
> * Didn't realize that.

I get the extended density idea, I have installed the driver, but
there seems to be no way of formatting the disks in this extended
density. It could be that I have the Mac version as it is marked AEHD+
on the front of the drive.

Oz30gta

Wayne Stewart

On Sep 4, 2:09*pm, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The AE 1.6mb drive could do extended density using the built-in GS controller?
> * Didn't realize that.

Yes. It was a nice idea. In some ways I wish Apple had gone with it.
They likely could have tweaked the IIgs firmware to make 1.6mb
bootable. But then we'd have another incompatibility issue