For this reason, machines designed for manual-inject mechanisms have two wide oval depressions for fingers atop and beneath the floppy, as shown in the first photo on this page. Unlike the auto-inject mechanism, the user must fully insert the floppy disk into the mechanism. All members of this group are manual-inject, and Apple considers all of them to be interchangeable, therefore they all share the same Apple part number. The newer incarnation of the SuperDrive was OEMed by both Sony and Mitsubishi, thus many different actual OEM part numbers will be found on the drives. All share part # 661-0474 to the best of my knowledge. I’ve personally seen three hyphened suffixes:Īll three of these were 100% mechanically and electrically interchangeable in my tests. The other tell-tale sign is the mechanical emergency eject being to the right of the floppy slot and in the same horizontal plane.Īll Sony OEM model numbers that i have seen to date start out with MP-F75W. As shown in the first photo on this page, machines designed for auto-inject mechanisms have the narrow floppy slot that is just wide enough for the floppy disk itself. There is a characteristic “kerchunk” sound as the disk and holder drop vertically onto the drive motor. The term “auto-inject” derives from the property of the mechanism’s design whereby when a floppy disk is inserted most of the way (say, 3/4 of the way or more), the mechanism grabs and pulls the disk the rest of the way in. The original SuperDrive was made by Sony, the maker of all Apple 3.5" floppy drives up until the mid-1990s. At present, this page only discusses desktop Mac floppy drives, not PowerBook variants. This page will attempt to clarify which differences are important and which are insignificant to users. (400k floppies formatted with MFS are far, far more common amongst Mac 400k floppies than those extremely rare few custom-formatted with HFS.) Over the years from the late 1980s up until the birth of the iMac in the late 1990s, there have been several OEM vendors for the floppy drive and two major variations for desktop Macs: auto-inject and manual-inject. They will also read, write, and format 400k MFS disks, with appropriate Mac OS or utility support. The original “SuperDrive” name came from the drive’s then-rare ability to correctly format, write, and read all of 400k, 800k, and 1.4 MB Mac HFS-formatted floppy disks. In recent (August 2004) online discussions, it is apparent that there is some confusion in some circles regarding the interchangeability of different versions of what Apple calls the “SuperDrive”: the standard 3.5" floppy drive built into most beige Macintosh models since just after the original Mac II.
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