The Commodore 8280 is a dual 8"
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
drive for
Commodore International
Commodore International Corporation was a home computer and electronics manufacturer with its head office in The Bahamas and its executive office in the United States founded in 1976 by Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. It was the successor compan ...
computers. It uses a wide rectangular steel case form similar to that of the
Commodore 4040, and uses the parallel
IEEE-488 interface common to
Commodore PET/CBM computers.
The 8280 replaced the earlier
806x series 8" drives and switched to half-height drives. Like the 8061/62 units, the 8280 supports
IBM 3740 disks. However, instead of 500k
group code recording (GCR) format used by other Commodore drives, it uses MFM as its native disk recording format, the only 8-bit Commodore drive to do so apart from the
1581. Contrary to the 8061/62, the drive ROM has the capability for formatting disks and verifying them, eliminating the need for external utility disk for these operations. The manual contains also a simple BASIC listing of a program to read sectors from IBM 3470 disks.
References
CBM floppy disk drives
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