![]() The disks were incredibly cheap and nasty and many were missing the shutter, with inevitably hilarious results involving sand. They were used on a few other systems, including Smith-Corona typewriters. Not so great for putting a filesystem on, but perfectly adequate if you're going to read the entire disk contents into RAM. You can rewrite individual sectors but the head always has to traverse the entire disk. From the FDC side of things they have a single track with lots of sectors. ![]() When the head reaches the centre of the disk a spring returns it to the outside. They're not random access there's a single spiral track, record-like, with the head in the drive being moved by a cam connected to the single drive motor. I briefly had someone interesting in adding Flu圎ngine support for it so that they could be read and written from normal PCs but haven't heard back from them. The closest I've seen to such is this article from Chris Covell, which has a photo of the innards, but the disk drive appears to be enclosed in a metal box.Ooh, Mitsumi Quick Disk! I've seen one of these in the wild exactly once, but not operating. Anything else is purely speculative/anecdotal (including my own above theory). Were the drive drives in said kiosk *actually better quality*, or is it simply that the kiosks resided in department stores which were air conditioned (proper humidity/temperature balance), thus the innards lasted longer? Maybe they WERE better quality - the only way to know for sure would be to have an actual hardware engineer do a teardown of both a Disk Writer kiosk as well as an FDS and provide an analysis. This might help explain why Disk Writer kiosks seem to be of "better quality". Japanese homes are not known for being spacious, things tend to be optimally positioned/placed to fit perfectly in small nooks and crannies. The Quick Disk was used on some older Roland products such as the S-10, S-220, MKS-100, MT-100 and PR-100. You've also got "general environment", like where people placed the FDS in their homes during use, if they left the system on for long periods of time (internal heat), etc. The Quick Disk (QD) was a media storage disk system made by Mitsumi Corporation as an alternative to the 5 1/4 inch floppy disk which was the standard at that time. I got a new FDS sometime later - same disks, works fine.Īnother thing that certainly would affect the belt would be humidity and environmental changes (consider moving from, say, Okinawa (warm part of Japan's southwestern islands) to Hokkaido (cold part of Japan)). I ended up giving said FDS to Matt Conte (of Nofrendo/cajoNES/nes6502/Nosefart fame), saying "it's yours, I hope you can fix it!" Unsure if he ever did. Otro formato de 3 pulgadas (75 mm) fue el formato Quick Disk de Mitsumi. Adjusting some of the timing pots didn't help either (and I didn't want to mess with those too much anyway, it can actually make things worse if you don't know exactly what is wrong with the system. DataDisk de 2.8 pulgadas de Smith Corona. Cleaning off all the residue was difficult, but even after I did so and replaced it with a supposedly authentic belt, it still didn't work. It wasn't goop - it had melted and become rock hard, and was all over the inside of the system. So while normal 3.5' and 5.25' drives have tracks arranged into a series of concentric circles separated into sectors, the Mitsumi quick disk doesnt. Once I got it and confirmed it didn't work (always got an error when reading from disks that were definitively good), I opened it up and found the drive belt had literally melted sometime long in the past. The very first FDS I ever had was given to me by a friend living in Japan who found it in a storage closet of a small company he was working for. over time? Lots of things - one of which is heat. What affects the belt tension, length, etc. So a lot of FDS drives start acting wonky because of the belt. ![]() Replacing belts in the FDS, as I recall, was a common thing. all which affects overall timing (and you already know what happens if you get this wrong). The drives use a very specific kind of belt, made from a somewhat odd or unique rubber (or rubber-like mix), and are *extremely* sensitive to belt length, belt tension, any cruft/junk on the belt motor (this can happen if/when replacing an old belt), etc. Expanding on it a bit more, as well as presenting my own opinion:
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