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20 hours ago
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The first disk drive available for Atari 8-bit computers was the Atari 810. This was a large, single-density, single-sided disk drive that could hold up to about 90K on each 5 1/4” disk1.
The 810 was a noisy beast and with its flip-up door, was clunky to use.
More importantly, even in 1980 when the 810 was released, 90K was not much storage. The Apple disk drives from 1977 could store 113K on a floppy and that would go up to 140K by 1980. The Commodore 1540 drive could store 170K on a disk.
Atari did develop an 815 double-density disk drive that would have been able to store about 180K per disk, but it was never released. However, other vendors did end up shipping double-density disk drives for the Atari 8-bits, which because of their smaller size, greater storage and lower price were popular. Two notable models are the Indus GT and the Rana 1000.
Check out ANALOG issue 17 for reviews of Atari disk drives:
