Recommendations for external floppy drive for an IBM 5160/XT?

[mk553]

I currently have a 1.2mb floppy inside my IBM XT, but as you're probably aware, there are inconvenient compatibility issues with 360K floppies.

And since the other bays are already occupied, I'd like to get an External 360K Floppy Drive for it, but I'm not sure which one to get. At least, I'm assuming they made external 360K floppy drives for it back in the day.

Any advice appreciated!

 

[dabone]

Do you have a external 37 pin floppy connector?

 

[krebizfan]

What controller do you have? I presume it is a high density one. Does it have an external floppy connector?

You have effectively two options. While either option was easy to get 30 to 40 years ago, selection is considerably more limited now.

An external drive hooked up to the floppy controller. This requires the special external floppy cable and a drive in a powered enclosure. Many external 5.25" drives from CP/M machines could be used. There were some strange ones that transferred power across the data cable. I would try to avoid those unless somehow you can find a complete setup with the adapter to add power.

The external drive that connects to the parallel port like the Microsolutions Backpack. The downside of the parallel port drive is that it can not handle formats that were not the standard IBM ones so the chance of reading or writing disks for other systems is right out.

 

[Chuck(G)]

The external drive that connects to the parallel port like the Microsolutions Backpack. The downside of the parallel port drive is that it can not handle formats that were not the standard IBM ones so the chance of reading or writing disks for other systems is right out.

Well, that's not strictly true. The Backpack uses the very good National DP8473 FDC, so it's just a matter of code. For our industrial customers, we marketed the Backpack with our own driver software and a special version of 22Disk. I posted the source to the interface code here some years ago.
Basically, it works just like a standard 765 controller; the big difference is that I/O form the host is done to a 16KB SRAM in the Backpack. All the regular FDC commands are processed and interrupt status is available on a special status register.