Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 3rd Apr 2009 16:16 UTC, submitted by google_ninja
Remember, back in the day, before USB drives became common place, you had to use those weird square disks? We called them floppies, and they had about as much storage capacity as my current computer has in its power switch alone. One of the problems with floppy drives was that it was impossible to determine whether there was a floppy in the drive without actually spinning up the drive. Windows 95 almost had a feature that could detect whether or not there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Not only was there a software fix that removed the click, I seem to remember that some drives that came out later did not click at all.
The drive that detected floppies on the Amiga had an extra switch that did the detecting, it is just that since the rest of the drive was standard hardware when the drive was polled it tried to startup as well.
It was also possible to use standard drives that did not have the extra sensor and thus did not click, but if you changed disks or first inserted one you had to send some command to get AmigaDos to read the disk root directory first.
My solution, a stack of three PC drives mounted together, at boot AmigaDos read they all and they contained all the key files that I never wanted off-line. The internal drive was for situations where I needed to swap disks.