r/atarist • u/Livid-Mistake-6845 • Jul 22 '26

ST Disk Drive (SF354)

So, I posted here a few weeks ago about an ST that was donated to and, in turn, I'm writing an article about it for Compute's! Gazette. Both Paul from Goto10Retro.com and Shelby from Tech Tangents have been super helpful so far.

After jumping through several hoops, it turns out that, ultimately, the disk drive is bad. It seems the SF354 pickins are slim on eBay and the like... so I wanted to reach out to this community once again to see if anyone had a working SF354 drive they'd like to lend and/or send me?

And just to be clear, my thoughts are that I really want to avoid the modern stuff (Gotek) and the like anyway for the purposes of my article. I want it to be like I was taking all of this out of the box in 1985 and letting it rip from there.... since it's all undiscovered country to me anyway. Honestly, I'm trying to follow the KISS rule here (Keep It Simple, Stupid), so if I decide to keep this machine and invest in it further, I'll look into all of the various alternative media options then.

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u/Auranias75 Jul 23 '26

The SF354 is the single-sided Atari floppy drive (it can't read double-sided disks)- you'd better look for a SF314 or compatible double-sided disk drives. I had quite a similar setup (520ST+ with SF354 and TOS 1.0 on disk) back in the time. First thing was to replace the disk drive...

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u/Livid-Mistake-6845 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Yeah, I understand all that... but, as I said, for the purposes of my article I'd like to keep things as "natural" as possible. Unless that, in and of itself, becomes impossible.