Floppy disk drive cable

[Seraphic]

One side of the Floppy disk drive cable has a twist in the cable, should that side go into the floppy drive or the motherboard?

[tzk]

Twisted side goes into the motherboard... though I don't think you can harm the floppy drive by which way the cable goes. So basically you have 8 possible combinations... though the power, don't get that wrong..

[hockeypro889]

so what's the purpose of the twist in the cable?

[tzk]

My bad.. the twist goes into the floppy drive, not the motherboard.. sigh.. I haven't dealt with floppies in years... but yeah.. it's used to identify which end goes into the floppy drive.

[devman]

so what's the purpose of the twist in the cable?

It identifies the drive.

Once upon a time when FDD cables had 3 connectors on them (like IDE's do now) one connector went in the mobo, the one before the twist was 5.25" and the one after the twist was 3.5"

People don't really have 5.25" drives anymore they only make two connector floppy cables and the twist was kept so that the single drive would be recognized as a 3.5"

[PleasantlyBlue]

Red-striped side of the cable goes to pin 1 on the drive.

[Brain_ReCall]

The twist was to designate floppy drive A, the other drive on the cable would become drive B. I have a cable that has five connectors, allowing up to two drives, either the pin-style seen on 3.5 inch drives or the card-edge-style seen on 5.25 inch drives. Since no one never uses more than one anymore, if any, they just reduced the cable down to the one connector.

See: http://www.nullmodem.com/Floppy.htm

[swatbat]

It identifies the drive.

Once upon a time when FDD cables had 3 connectors on them (like IDE's do now) one connector went in the mobo, the one before the twist was 5.25" and the one after the twist was 3.5"

People don't really have 5.25" drives anymore they only make two connector floppy cables and the twist was kept so that the single drive would be recognized as a 3.5"

Pretty close. The twist came in before the 3.5 drives were out.

The floppy controller supports 2 drives in the standard config(the japenese market had a standard that would support 3 drives). Instead of useing jumpers on the drives they had a twist in the cable around the first drive to seperate it from the second one. Most people don't need 2 drives anymore so the cables you normally see are single drive cables.

Long ago the floppy drive controller was used for more then just floppy drives as well. Tape drives use to use it before ide really took over as it was cheaper then scsi. Hard drives could use it too before ide really took off as well.

In the past it was really helpful to run more then one floppy drive. Some of us can remember having to run an application off one floppy drive while using the second one to save files. This was before hard drives really were standard in a pc.