Macintosh 800K External Drive

Background

In January 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus which had a Sony double-sided 800-kilobyte capacity disk drive, and used the new HFS disk format providing directories and sub-directories. This drive was fitted into an external case as the Macintosh 800K External Drive (M0131), which was slimmer than the earlier 400-kilobyte drive. It could be used with Macintosh models except for the original 128K, which could not load the HFS disk format. The drive supported the older 400-kilobyte single-sided disks allowing them to be shared. The use of Apple's GCR with variable speed (as used on the 400-kilobyte drive) accommodated a higher storage capacity than its 720-kilobyte PC counterparts. In addition, the mechanism was much quieter and significantly faster than its predecessor. Designed primarily to run on Macs with the new 128-kilobyte ROM which contained the necessary code to support the drive, it could be used with Macs with older 64-kilobyte ROMs if the proper software was loaded from the system folder of a Hard Disk 20 into the Mac's RAM. The drive controlled its own speed and was no longer dependent on an external signal from the Mac, which was blocked on the early drive mechanisms compatible only with the Macintosh. Later universal mechanisms, first used on the Apple II to accommodate proprietary signals, required special cables to isolate the speed signal from the Mac, to prevent damage to the drive. However, with its increased storage capacity combined with 2-4 times the RAM available on the Mac Plus, the external drive was less of a necessity than it had been with its predecessors. Nevertheless, with the only option for adding additional storage being extremely expensive hard drives, a year later Apple increased the maximum number of floppy drives that could be accessed simultaneously to three on the Macintosh SE (the Macintosh Portable was the only other Mac to do so).