How to connect a slimline laptop floppydrive to Falcon

Laptop floppy drives are half the height of standard 3.5" drives. If you swap your Falcon's floppy drive for one of these there's 12.5mm that can be used for other things, like switches, SD/CF-readers, Gotek and other stuff that people usually massacre their case to fit.

The 26-pin connector on these floppy drives are not easy to get hold of, I solved this by soldering a piece of floppy cable directly to the drive's controller. Adapters are also available but tend to be a bit expensive. Also, since these are made for PC's they would require a bit of modification anyway.

Laptop floppyFalcon floppy
Signal PinPin Signal
+5V 1 +5V
Index 2 8 Index
+5V 3 +5V
Drive select 0 4 10 Drive select 0
+5V 5 +5V
Disk change 6 34 Disk change
NC 7 NC
Ready 8 NC
Drive Enable 0 9 16 Motor on
Motor Enable 0 10 16 Motor on
Density 11 2 Density
Direction 12 18 Direction
NC 13 NC
Step 14 20 Step
Ground 15 1 Ground
Write Data 16 22 Write data
Ground 17 3 Ground
Write Gate 18 24 Write gate
Ground 19 5 Ground
Track 0 20 26 Track 0
Ground 21 7 Ground
Write Protect 22 28 Write protect
Ground 23 9 Ground
Read Data 24 30 Read data
Ground 25 11 Ground
Side 1 Select 26 32 Side select

Laptop floppy drives have no separate power connector. Connect the 5V-pins to the 5V-pin (red wire) on the Falcon floppy connector.

The Ground pins on the laptop floppy drive can be connected to any of the odd pins on the Falcon floppy cable.


Jo Even Skarstein, 2017 ->
joska at atari-forum.com
joska@online.no