Amiga Floppy Drive Compatibility List

Since a disk drive is by nature a moving part, it is inevitable that it will fail someday. The vast majority of Amiga computers out
there are least a decade old (some are nearly 20 years old), and so many users have had the misfortune of their disk drives dying on
them. Replacing them is difficult because while Amiga disk drives are for the most part electrically compatible with those used in the
Wintels of today, there are slight but vital differences in terms of both signals and pinout.

The problem stems mainly from the fact that Commodore used low-density drives throughout the Amiga line up until the Amiga 4000 and
3000T. (After that they made things even worse by switching to custom-made high-density drives that spun at half the speed of a normal
high-density floppy drive.) In contrast, low-density drives were quickly phased out of use in the IBM world sometime around the mid-
1980s and can be found on only the oldest of machines. The aim of this guide is to provide information on which disk drives will work
or can be made to work in an Amiga.

If properly configured, some drives listed will work right away, and some will work with modifications. Most others cannot be
configured at all. Drives that can't be reconfigured can be made to sort of work with a cable hack, but the "diskchange" signal will
probably not work right (at least, it never worked for me). As a result, the Amiga will not be able to tell whether or not the drive
has a disk inside. It is not possible to swap disks in games or start up an Amiga 1000 past the "insert Workbench" screen with this
trick. Drives that have been modified or reconfigured sometimes suffer from a missing or different "ready" signal- this can cause
problems with certain pieces of software that access the disk drive directly.

If you don't feel like modifying an existing floppy drive or can't find one that can be reconfigured, there are a few alternatives.
Individual Computers offers an adapter board called the Kylwalda, which can be used to make almost any modern Wintel disk drive fully
Amiga compatible. Eyetech also used to sell something called the EZ-DF0, which does something similar.

The following chart should help in figuring out which model of floppy drive might work best with your Amiga. Some work, some need
modifications in order to completely work, and the rest will only partially work with the cable hack.

3.5 Drives:

Works Can be
Manufacturer Model Notes
unmodified? modified?
Alps Electric DF354H090F Unknown Unknown
Chinon FZ-354 Yes N/A
Chinon FZ-354A Yes N/A
Chinon FZ-357 Yes N/A
Chinon FZ-357A Yes N/A Will work as high-density drive in an Amiga.
Chinon FB-354 Yes N/A Has 6-pin jumper block on back. Short pins 3 and 5.
Epson SMD-380 No No
Epson SMD-300 Unknown Maybe
Has large jumper array on the back-First row labeled G,A,A,T,T,0,(BLANK),1, second row labeled
Epson SMD-340 No No H,(BLANK),L,(BLANK),S,2(BLANK),3. Docs are here.
Mitsumi D359T7 Unknown Unknown
NEC FD1231H Unknown Unknown
NEC FD1035 Yes N/A Low-density drive.
NEC FD1036 A Yes N/A Low-density drive.
Panasonic JU-257T234P Unknown Maybe Has 5 setting switches- RY/DC, NC/OUT/IN, 0/3/2/1, SE/AT/PS2, MO/MS.
Panasonic JU-257A023F Partially Maybe Has 6 setting switches- 0/3/2/1, M0/M1, RY/DC, AT/PS2, NC/EX(or OUT/EX), A/B.
Yes-see
Panasonic JU-257A606P Unknown this file
on Aminet
Yes-see
this CAPS
Panasonic JU-257A605P Partially Knowledge
Base
article
Panasonic JU-257A606PC Unknown Maybe
Panasonic JU-257A607P Unknown Maybe
Panasonic JU-257A137P Unknown Maybe
Panasonic JU-253-033P Yes N/A To make it work, set MS/MD to MD, 0/1/2/3 to 0, RY/DC to RY.
Panasonic JU-253-243P Unknown Unknown
Sony MPF920-F No No Has one setting jumper.
Has jumper grid for settings. To make it work, short pins 5 and 10, 11 and 6, 8 and 7, and 13 and 12.
Sony MPF420-1 Yes N/A Also see: illustrated configuration.
Sony MPF110-05 Yes N/A Low-density drive.
Sony MPF17W-1 Unknown Unknown
Has holes in the bottom of the housing through which solder pads with settings marked next to them can
Samsung SFD-321B/KEPN Unknown Unknown be seen.
Tamagawa TS3118N8 Yes N/A Low-density drive.
TEAC FD-235HFA429 Unknown Unknown Settings can be changed with solder pads according to the manuals.
Low-density drive. Has 6 setting jumpers-MS, IR, RY, DC, D1, D0. To make it work, put jumpers on RY,
TEAC FD-235F Yes N/A DC & D0.
Has a grid of setting jumpers, with 4,3,2,1 from left to right and ABCDEFG from bottom to top. To make
it work, put jumpers from 1A to 1B, 3A to 3B, 4C to 3C, 4E to 3E and 4G to 3G. Also short the "Frame
TEAC FD-235HF3823 Yes N/A Ground" jumper, which sits to the upper left of the main jumper grid. Also see: illustrated
configuration.
Has a grid of setting jumpers, with 4,3,2,1 from left to right and ABCDEFG from bottom to top. To make
it work, put jumpers from 1A to 1B, 3A to 3B, 4A to 4B, 3C to 4C, 3E to 4E, and 3G to 4G. Also short
TEAC FD-235HF3435 Yes N/A the "Frame Ground" jumper, which sits to the upper left of the main jumper grid. Also see: illustrated
configuration.
TEAC FD-235HF4240 N/A N/A Has a grid of setting jumpers, with 2,1 from left to right and ABCDE from bottom to top.

NOTE: All drives listed will only work with Amigas as 880K or 720K drives unless specifically noted.

Advice for unknown drives: if there's config switches or jumpers (sometimes you have to open the cover to get to them), experiment with
every combination and see if that makes the drive work any better. If there aren't any, it's probably only going to work with the cable
hack(which is not a practical solution) or an adapter board(which is costly).

If you have any corrections, additions or comments to add, feel free to e-mail me. Information on the kit called "The Real HD-Drive
A357" and how it worked would be greatly appreciated, as would tips on how to modify the most common floppy drives in use today (such
as the TEAC FD-235HFAXXX) for Amiga use.
 Hacking a Chinon FZ-357 floppy disk drive to an Amiga HD floppy drive
Standard disclaimer:
I have only read this information in an old Hungarian Amiga magazine, and tried it myself. It seemed to be correct, and its result
worked for me. However, I cannot guarantee that it would also work for anybody else, and hereby I present it on an "as is" basis,
without warranty of any kind, so if you damage yourself, your disk drive, your Amiga, or anything /
anybody else, it is not my liability.

Step 1: Identification

First, you have to find an *appropriate* Chinon FZ-357 drive. Alas, only a part of the whole
production was equipped with the same motor controller chip as the FB-357A model (the A3000/A4000 HD
floppy drive); many of the FZ-357s were intended to be PC only, and therefore this hack won't work
with them. So you have to check the product sticker on the backside. If it says "MADE IN JAPAN", it
is surely the PC-only variety. If it says "MADE IN MALAYSIA", you can continue with examining the
flywheel (the big round exposed thing on the bottom of the drive). If it looks like this then you
are lucky. The important thing is that the flywheel should have two *straight* lines of text, and
not three arcs around a circle. If your FZ-357 matches with all these criteria, you can go on. If
not, don't bother with it!

Step 2: Disassembly

Remove the upper half of the metal lid first. It is held together with the lower half by four small clamps; you can pop them out with a
screwdriver in the four semicircle-shaped holes at the sides of the drive. Then remove the spring that pushes the disk holder mechanism
down. This spring can be warped easily, so handle it with care. Then the disk holder mechanism itself can be removed. It is held
together by four small plastic thingies; remember their position, as they must be assembled later in the same way! Finally you can
unscrew the two screws at the bottom half of the metal lid and remove the remaining insides of the drive. Turn over the insides, so
that the original front panel of the drive looks away from you and the original bottom of the drive is upwards. You can see two pieces
of PCB: the 'upper' one, nearer to you, holds the 34-pin floppy cable connector and many other things, the 'lower' one holds the
flywheel, the spinner motor and the motor controller chip. The 'upper' PCB is in the way now, so unscrew the two little screws that
hold it and pull it slightly upwards and toward yourself, so the whole 'lower' PCB is exposed.

Be *VERY* careful, as this 'upper' PCB has three extremely thin foil cables (from the disk R/W heads and the head stepper motor)
connected to it! If you damage these foil cables, the whole drive becomes useless!!!

I recommend to disconnect the foil cables from their sockets - with a very-very gentle hand! - and then to move the 'upper' PCB.
The 'upper' and the 'lower' PCB is also connected with a piece of ribbon cable - it is much sturdier, but don't damage it either.

Step 3: Fine Soldering

The controller chip is an SMD IC mounted diagonally at the lower right corner of
the 'lower' PCB. Originally it should look approximately like this:

There are four solder pads beside it, forming a 'Y' shape, marked as J7.
There are four solder pads beside it, forming a 'Y' shape, marked as J7.

The actual target of this step is that tiny SMD resistor, marked as R12, which
is soldered between the central and the lower solder pads.

This SMD resistor must be removed from its current place and re-soldered between
the central and upper left solder pads, as shown in this figure:

Step 4: Dropping Solder Blobs

After successfully completing Step 3, you can put the 'upper' PCB back
to its place (reconnect the foil cables if they were removed). There are
some more modifications necessary on this PCB as well:

First drop two blobs of solder to the pairs of solder pads marked as J2
and J7, so they are shortened. Then solder a short piece of insulated
wire between one pad of J1 and pin #6 of the FDD connector header (it is
the third pin from right in the upper row), as shown in the figure
above.

Step 5: Reassembly & Reconfiguration

The floppy drive can now be put together, basically by reversing the process described in Step 2. The jumpering must also be modified,
according to the following scheme:

RDY
O O O O O O O
| | |
O O-O O O O O
DS0 MM TTL

Step 6: External Electronics

Unfortunately, all the hard work you've done is still not enough. A small external electronic circuit must also be built so that the
Amiga motherboard could actually recognize the drive as a HD floppy unit. The actual schematics of this circuit depend on whether you
want an internal or an external floppy drive. The original article described a version for internal drives; it is shown here, without
any comments.

Further versions, and a very detailed theory of operation, can be obtained from the archive "PCFloppy2Amiga.lha" in the hard/hack
section of Aminet.
Install a PC floppy drive into an Amiga A1200 computer replacing the 880k.
Purpose:
Install a PC floppy drive into an Amiga A1200 computer replacing the 880k. Format a 880k disk. Read and write data onto and from an
880k disk.

Notes:
Certain problems arise when installing a PC 3.25" floppy drive into an Amiga A1000, A500 and A1200. The purpose of this experiment was
to see if a PC floppy drive would work as a standard 880k Amiga floppy drive. I found that most of the floppy drives made today (2003
as of this writing), have no jumpers for configuring the drive. I was unsuccessfull in getting any PC floppy drive that did not have
jumpers to work on the 3 machines mentioned above. Let me say it again. PC floppy drives cannot be installed into an Amiga A1000, A500
or A1200 without configuring the drive in some manner wether it be soldering pads on the PCB of the drive or setting jumpers on drives
that have them. Simply put, A PC floppy drive does not work in an Amiga. You cannot simply install a PC floppy drive into an Amiga and
expect it to work.
Below are a couple of drives with which I had some success.

Sony MPF420-1 Floppy Drive:

PC floppy drive on an Amiga A1200.
I found a little information on the web at the following URL's:
http://www.osemidlands.co.uk/support/insight/insight/en/common/drives/floppy/so420-1f.htm

Pins 4,5,9,10,14 and 15 control the drive ID. DS0-DS3

Changes made to this drive in order to get it to work on a stock Amiga A1200
were moving the DS jumper to the 5,10 position and adding another jumper for
disk checking at position 8,7. The blue jumper below was not present until I
added it.
Some notes:
I have not tried writing at 300 RPM (1.44M mode). I believe it wont work (my
friend Tom guarantees it wont) and my experiment was only to get a high density
PC floppy drive working on the Amiga as a 880K drive and not in high density
mode.
I suspect one of the jumpers in the array will enable/disable 720K/1.44M modes.
If I can't find the jumper, I will modify the density switch inside the disk
trap door.
The first attempt at formatting a disk with the density window taped failed from
Workbench 3.1. A further attempt to format the floppy from WB 3.1 on DF1 failed
on 0 cylinder (a different external Amiga Chinon drive). A 3rd attempt to format
the floppy in CLI failed at cylinder 76 on the Sony. The 4th attempt in CLI
succeeded with the Sony drive.
This drive is a very old drive and may have problems causing some of the noted
failures. Heads may need alignment and dust may have worn them out somewhat.
Teac 235HF-3823:
http://www.teac.com/DSPD/pdf/3fd0020a.pdf
In general all Teac 235HF 38XX series floppy drives should have the same jumper settings as
the one in the picture below. If my powers of induction are correct, jumper AB1 is to set
the drive to be DF0 (DS0). Jumper FG is for grounding and should not be changed. Jumper C34
is to get disk checking happening. The other jumpers are unknown to me but it stands to
reason that one is for DC/RY. Another should be for DC/RY at pin 2,4,34 on ribbon cable.
And another should be to put the drive in 2DD mode instead of 2HD mode.
Notes:
This drive performed without errors in both 2DD and 2HD mode. I was able to format both
from WB3.1 and from CLI without problem.
I formatted one disk at 880k without tape on the Density Sensor window. It seems to have
formatted correctly though I can't say that one of the jumpers I mentioned has the drive
set to 2DD mode. At this point I am assuming that because the drive didn't perform any
faster. 2HD mode should be approximately twice as fast as 2HD mode because of the higher
rotation speed in 2HD mode *.
*This is not true. After checking the specs, my assumption about RPM was wrong. While the
data rate is half as much in 2DD mode (250bps), the rotation speed is a constant 300rpm.
Thanks to Paul on the correction.
But as you can see below, one problem remains. The drives will fit inside the case of
the A1200 but the button placement is wrong. Help on this issue can be found here. Thanx
Tom. The drive with the goop on the front is the Sony. The Teac, just above the Sony
drive, lines up better than it looks in the picture. The drive on top, which is covered
by the top casing of the A1200 is the original Panasonic floppy drive which came with
the unit.

Conclusion:
I would say that the trick to getting a PC floppy drive working on any Amiga computer is
this: Lots of jumpers. The more the better. Some drives with which I experimented only
had a few jumpers. These drives only allow changing the drive ID number (DS). Others
which have more selections will allow changing from DC to RY on pin 34 of the ribbon. I
even found a drive that will allow changing the color of the drive LED from Amber to
Green. Further discussion on the options is out of the scope of this experiment. I would
say that the experiment was a success but I need to do further testing. Keeping the old
Amiga's alive and kicking is an important issue to some people. This experiment means
that you can replace your old Amiga 880K floppy drive with a later model high density
floppy drive. Used PC floppy drives will cost between $2 and $10 dollars. I spent $7
dollars on the Teac. Compare that to the $30 dollars that Softhut wants for an amiga
floppy drive.
Taking it a step further:
build a device but I am no longer focusing on the project. And I'm no expert.

I think it would be interesting to discuss the possibility of building an adaptor that would fit on the ribbon cable to convert a PC
floppy drive into an Amiga floppy drive. I believe that in order to get the adaptor to work on ALL PC floppy drives would require
more expertise than I have and may be cost prohibitive. November 2, 2003 I was looking at this page today and noticed that I implied
that there is no device that will allow usage of a PC floppy drive. There are a few devices available but they cost more than I am
willing to pay. Catweasle is the name of one of them. My desire was to design and build a device but I am no longer focusing on the
project. And I'm no expert. © Bruce Marcus
Fixing the AT A1200 FDD connector Related Links:
External - Ville9's Hardware Hacks
This is a hardware modification generously donated by Ville9. You can also see the
original Amiga Guide document Ville9's Hardware Hacks.
Disclaimer
This article describes physical modifications to your system and should only be carried
out if you feel comforable with it. Any damage to your system done by acting on this
information is not our responsibility. Both ville9 and CAPS do not provide any warrenty
for the information in this article under any circumstances.
Fixing the AT A1200 FDD connector
A1200s produced by Amiga Technologies (Escom) had been shipped with a PC floppy disk
drive, resulting in many problems with trackloading games. AT had to modify the
mainboard to make the Panasonic JU-257A605P drives work on an A1200 (by redirecting the
_CHNG signal and cutting off the _RDY signal). The following steps describe how to
revert these modifications.
When looking at the bottom of the PCB, you'll notice a wire soldered between pin 34 of
the internal FDD connector and pin 2 also on the internal connector. Just change this
wire to connect pin 34 of the internal FDD header with pin 1 of the external FDD
connector as shown on the image below. This way, the connections on the PCB will be the
same as on A1200s produced by Commodore. The Panasonic drive won't work anymore with
your modified A1200, but you can now use any real Amiga floppy disk drive like the Cinon Panasonic Drive Pinout Modification
FZ-357 or simply modify your Panasonic JU-257A605P to be 100% compatible.

Modifying the Pansonic JU-257A605P

This is a hardware modification generously donated by Ville9. You can also see the original Amiga Guide document Ville9's Hardware Hacks.
Disclaimer
This article describes physical modifications to your system and should only be carried out if you feel comforable with it. Any damage to your system done by acting on
this information is not our responsibility. Both ville9 and CAPS do not provide any warrenty for the information in this article under any circumstances.
Modifying the Pansonic JU-257A605P

The Panasonic JU-257A605P drive used in A1200s built by Amiga Technologies is designed
for IBM compatible computers, that's why it has _CHNG on pin 34 and why it misses the
_RDY signal. The following steps describe how to rebuild the Panasonic disk drive.
Carefully unplug the head and stepper motor cables and lift the circuit board. You
can't remove it completely as there is a cable going to the drive motor board, which
must not be broken! There's a conductive strip at position R53, which has to be cut
using a sharp knife. Now use a small wire and solder it at position R52 as shown on
the image below. Solder another wire from R53 to pin 2 of the 34 pin connector and
reassemble your disk drive.
Your Panasonic JU-257A605P now has _CHNG on pin 2 and _RDY on pin 34 like any other
real Amiga floppy disk drive. So it will work in any Amiga system built by Commodore,
ranging from A500 to A4000T!
Using this drive on a system built by Amiga Technologies, i.e. those in the Amiga 1200
"Magic Pack" will require changes to the motherboard.

Panasonic Drive Pinout Modification
Floppy Drive CHINON 357 to Amiga adaptor: