I needed a reliable working drive so I can come up with a way to replace the Quick Disk with a floppy drive emulator board (probably the HxC board).
I owe a large favor to the synth Gods and I fear it's going to be steep if/when the come to collect. The odds were pretty stacked against any sort of revival. I had no idea the drive interface even worked at this point but I was able to get the thing working, saving samples, verifying the saves and reloading them. I just unplugged it and plugged in the Yamaha drive. I wont even touch the drive in this thing it's so horrid. Cleaned that up and put on a suitable elastic band, then dug into the MD-280. I sacrificed a dead MDF-1 I had laying around, pulled the drive out of it and discovered (quelle surprise!) that the drive belt had rotted away to goo. This thing looked like a family of pigeons made a home and shit in it for a decade. I should have left it behind, I should have known better. I just spent the better part of a day reviving an MD-280 that I got for 'free' with my Akai S_612. Thankfully I think there's only a few musical things that have these in them (Akai S-612/MD-280, Akai S-700, Roland S-10, and the bizarre Yamaha MDF-1 MIDI disk drive, anything else?)
*Unreliable, drives and disks can just up and die at any time - CHECK *Drive is notoriously finicky wrt head alignment, motor speed, gearing - CHECK *Drive is belt driven and the belt is made of a material that disintegrates into nasty black goo over time - CHECK *No sliding latch to protect the disk surface from dirt and dust - CHECK *Nonstandard disk size and format - CHECK Take everything that was good about floppy drive technology and throw it out the window. It does not store any personal data.Anyone had the misfortune of using Mitsumi 2.8" Quick Disks? They are quite possibly the biggest technology turd of the 80's (at least for synths). The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin.
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