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I'm trying to fix the floppy drive in my Roland MC-500. The floppy drive inside is a Matsushita DDF3-1 which doesn't seem to be in production anymore. The DDF3-2 is still available, however it is an HD drive.

Does anyone know off the top of their heads if there is any issue with simply swapping the two drives? Could the power usage be different on the drives? Since the machine is expecting a 720k DD drive, are there any jumper settings to have the HD drive function as a DD drive?

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HD drives are designed to read and write DD diskettes. HD diskettes have an extra hole in the corner. If you use DD diskettes, that certainly wouldn't hurt. (The hole can be covered with tape to "convert" the diskette.)

You can also force the drive to format an HD diskette as DD, so there's no hardware limitation.

So my guess is yes, it should work.

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Nice tip with covering the hole. +1 for you. – Randolph West Dec 30 '10 at 2:26
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I believe you can do this.

If there is only a few $ in it (and last I checked bare floppy drives are under US$10 each) then I'd just do it and see what happens.

There should be no power issues and last I saw of these the HD drive will read/write DD drives. However my experience in this is quite old now.

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Yes, I think this a 'try it and see' problem. Edit: 720K DD drives are available on ebay but at phenomenal prices (120GBP) that tempt me to go through the old stuff in my attic! – Linker3000 Dec 28 '10 at 22:51
My local PC store has internal floppy drives (presumably DD) still available at a massive AUD$9 each. Depending on where you are you may be able to buy a brand new one for about US$5 to US$10. – quickly_now Dec 29 '10 at 9:01
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