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.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:2008-07-15
Plus, a good number of Apple's 3.5 drives operated a bit differently than those on the PC (weren't the disks formatted differently too, 800K instead of 720K for a while?) At any rate, most of Apple's 3.5 drives didn't grind even when you tried to access them with no disk. I can't really describe the sound they made, it was a good deal quieter than most PC drives. They were that way from the Apple IIgs 3.5 drives all the way up through a good number of Macintoshes, I'm not sure exactly when they went to standard 1.44 drives and when the situation changed. Even once Apple started using more pc-sounding, for lack of a better description, drives I don't remember them grinding except when the computer was turned on, and only for a second. Either Apple always knew what result the command would generate (very likely) or they used the probe for a boot floppy also as a test for the return value of the command.
Member since:2006-10-08
I can remember I had a Sun SparcStation 20 and an Ultra 1, both with CD-ROM and floppy. The floppy drive didn't have an eject button (as the newer Apple ones, I still have an MacIntosh IIgs with this configuration) and I think it was ejected by software. Did Solaris (must have been version 7 or 8) have the detection feature? I can't remember, help me! :-)
Member since:
2005-07-06
But did the Mac have to spin up the drive to discover this?