Sam Drive

MGT

The Coupé could support two 3.5” Ultraslim Citizen Double Density drives each with their own WD-1772-02 disc controller allowing both drives to operate independantly.

Unformatted capacity 1Mb, formatted as double sided, 80 track per side, 10 sectors per track, to the IBM 3740 standard gives 800kB with 780kB usable after directory space subtracted.

Having the drive controller within the drive housing meant that the floppy drive connectors could be used for other devices, most notablty the ATOM IDE interface.

Drive Connectors:

Connections to the two drives are made via two 32-pin Euroconnectors, with rows A and B connected. Drive 1 is on the left of the machine and drive 2 on the right. A list of signals available at these sockets are shown below.

Presumably, three editions of the user’s guide were published. The 3rd edition can be found as a PDF Manual Scan at www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

There is a bug that can cause disc corruption if a disc is left in the drive and the reset button pressed.