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IBM 5170 - "Matching" 3.5" Floppy Drive

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weriov

New Member
Joined
Aug 18, 2021
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Location
Central Florida, USA
Hi everyone,

I'm in the early stages of restoring an IBM 5170 (Type 1) that came with two 5.25" floppy drives - a YD-380 and a 360k Toshiba. Now that I finally have a suitable IDE controller, I'd like to swap the Toshiba drive out for a 3.5" 1.44MB drive. If at all possible, I'd really like to find a drive and bezel/tray that color-matches the YD-380 as closely as possible, but I'm not sure where to look. Might anyone be able to offer a recommendation on where I could find something close?

Thanks in advance for any pointers - I really appreciate them!
 
You could try your luck in the "Wanted" section of this forum to see if anyone has an original for sale, Apart from that Ebah is probably your best bet, Look for the old style floppy drive mounting kits, [ Example ] Getting an exact colour match Drive may take some digging.
 
What color do you have and what color do you want it to be? That drive came with 3 different front plates also other Toshiba drives w/o face plates can be bought cheap on eBay. For example if you want to upgrade from a 720K to a 1.44M is easy because the same face plate works with both drives. If the YD-380 is that grayish color the Toshiba match is slightly lighter. A retrobright on the YD-380 might bring it closer. If you need a Black Color then paint it. FYI it took me over 5 years to spot a Toshiba w/any 5.25" faceplate on eBay.
 
I thought you were trying to get the big old half-height 3.5" drive that IBM used? I saw an AT faceplate for one of those sell on ebay a couple months ago, the are out there but rare
 
Thanks to everybody for all the suggestions and tips. Just to clarify - while it'd be certainly be great to find one of the IBM-manufactured "full-size" units, all I'm looking for is a generic 3.5"/1.44MB floppy drive and expansion-bay adapter in a color matching the original beige-gray of the 5170 case and YD-380 faceplate. My primary challenge has been trying to guess what color, when viewed on my LCD monitor, would be a good match. I'm not against painting something if necessary, but if there's a way to find something "close" that doesn't require alteration, so much the better.

For example - there seem to be a ton of Mitsumi D359T5 units out there, and on my monitor, they look like they could be a pretty close color match - but I don't know whether they look that way in the flesh. I was just wondering whether someone out there happened to have found themselves in the same predicament at some point and ended up running across a model that they could recommend.

In any event, thanks again to everyone for all of the ideas - ultimately, I'll probably end up taking my best guess and painting if that doesn't work out, but I'll gladly accept any and all other additional suggestions as well!
 
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