Floppy drives
Floppy drives! Do you really need them?
Do you still have your collection of floppy disks from back then? Are you planning on starting a collection of old Big Box games and install them? Just want to buy old disk collections at garage sales or flea markets?
If the answer to the above is no, then you don't exactly need floppy drives. It will, however, make your life easier, if you do have a floppy drive - but not necessarily a real one. What do I mean? Well, you may have seen the GoTek floppy emulators, that slots in to a 3½" bay, and with a USB flash drive acts like a floppy drive.
The Gotek connects internally the exact same way as a floppy drive, and is seen as such by the BIOS - no drivers needed. This will provide you with a way to (first of all) install DOS, and to have something resembling diskettes for downloaded disk images. In its standard configuration, you can have 1.000 disks on a USB stick and switch between them with the two small buttons.
The USB is not directly readable on a modern PC, though, as the drive does some weird formatting of it. Or... it wasn't. A German company called Ipcas made a program for working with these on modern Windows, so go grab the USB Floppy Emulator V2 Software. PhilsComputerLab made a video on how to work with the software.
I will, however, recommend adding a rotary encoder, swapping out the display with an OLED display and flashing the thing with FlashFloppy. This will make your Gotek even better, as you now just need a FAT32 formatted USB, on which you can put all the disk images (FlashFloppy supports a variety of formats) just as you would with any files - you are no longer limited to 1.000 "disks" on your USB. You can order them in directories, and insted of remembering which number corresponds to which disk when you need them, you navigate to the disc using the rotary encoder with the display showing the filename of your current selection. It will even show you what track and head are currently reading/writing. Instructions are on the GitHub page.
If you are not that confident with a soldering iron, you can most likely find someone online who will sell you a fully functioning modded drive. This is what I did - ordered it from a guy in UK via ebay. It took a few months or so with no communication before it arrived, so I'm guessing they were made to order (and that he himself had to wait for delivery of some parts).
As of this writing, there are still plenty of options on ebay from USA and (oddly) Germany, predominantly. Apparently Germans are retro lovers!?
Can I have more than two floppy drives?
Yes - and no...
In the original specification from IBM, the floppy controller did in fact support four drives - two internal and two external. As only very few people really had the need to have more than two 5¼" 360 K drives, later controllers removed the support for the external drives.
You can find floppy controllers where you can set the controller address with jumpers on the board and make it a secondary controller, but they won't work, unless you computers BIOS has built-in support for four drives (these are very rare). Apart from specialized programs than can address the controllers directly, DOS can only see what the BIOS tells it is there.
The solution is four-drive controllers - that is, a floppy controller that has two floppy channels and its own on-board BIOS, that extends the capabilities of the PCs own BIOS. Beware, though - not all four-drive controllers have their own on-board BIOS, which means it still relies on the PCs BIOS to support four drives - most of them don't!
There is another possibilty, called...
LS-120, aka. The Super Disk Drive
The Laser-Servo 120 MB drive came around 1996-1997. It was made for a special disk that resembled the 3½" disk, but could hold 120 MB. They are backwards compatible with standard 3½" disks, so they can read and write them - sometimes it can even read disks that normal drives can't, due to its smaller read/write head. This also means that you can have problems reading a disk written a LS-120 drive in a normal drive, in the same way that a 5¼" 360 K drive can have problems reading a 360 K disk written in a 1,2 MB drive.
The point here is that it can be used as a third floppy drive because it connects via IDE, not the floppy cable. Because of this it requires drivers to work under DOS, at a cost of a bit of conventional memory, but on the upside, it is faster at both reading and writing standard disks. You cannot boot from it, though, unless your motherboard supports booting from LS-120.
Apparently LS-120 drives are not exactly reliable when used with 120 MB disks, but for 1.44 there should be no problems.
