Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mia Magnusson" <mia@plea.se>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?


> ...It also requires heads able to handle the flux transitions per distance rate, which in the 1001/8050/8520 is probably solved by using heads
that were really intended for the HD MFM format.

Were HD disks/drives around when the 8050 was released? It looks like the 8050 was around in 1980 or earlier, whereas HD drives didn't really appear until 1984; when I bought my first new 8050 for $2500 it had a greater capacity per disk than most contemporary systems..

More likely that they were just 'standard' DD 96/100TPI heads; the normal unformatted capacity of 96 and 100 TPI drives was 500KB/side, so I'd think that the additional sectors gained by zone recording would easily reach the 8050's formatted 500KB on the same DD or 'QD' disks.