Rotronics Wafadrive

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The Rotronics Wafadrive was a peripheral for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer, intended to compete with Sinclair's ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive.

The Wafadrive comprised two continuous loop "stringy floppy" tape drives, an RS-232 interface and Centronics parallel port.

The drives could run at two speeds, high speed for seeking and low speed for reading/writing, which was significantly slower than that of Microdrives. The cartridges (or "wafers"), the same as those used in Entrepo stringy floppy devices for other microcomputers, were physically larger than Microdrive cartridges. They were available in three different capacities, nominally 16 kB, 64 kB or 128 kB.

The same drive mechanism, manufactured by BSR, and cartridges were used in a similar device known as the Quick Data Drive (QDD), designed to connect to the serial port of the Commodore 64 home computer.

v • d • e Magnetic tape data storage formats Three Quarter Inch (19 mm) Linear LINCtape (1962) • DECtape (1963) Helical Sony DIR (19xx) • Ampex DST (1992) Half Inch (12.65 mm) Linear UNISERVO (1951) • IBM 7 track (1952) • 9 track (1964) • IBM 3480 (1984) • DLT (1984) • IBM 3590 (1995) • T9840 (1998) • IBM 3592 (?) • T9940 (2000) • LTO Ultrium (2000) • T10000 (2006) Helical Redwood SD-3 (1995) • DTF (19xx) • SAIT (2003) Eight Millimeter (8 mm) Linear Travan (1995) • IBM 3570 MP (1997) • ADR (1999) Helical Data8 (1987) • Mammoth (1994) • AIT (1996) • VXA (1999) Quarter Inch (6.35 mm) Linear QIC (1972) • SLR (1986) • Ditto (1992) Eighth Inch (3.81 mm) Linear KC Standard, Compact Cassette (1975) • HP DC100 (1976) • Commodore Datassette (1977) • DECtapeII (1979) Helical DDS/DAT (1989) Stringy (1.58 - 1.9 mm) Linear Exatron Stringy Floppy (1979) • ZX Microdrive (1983) • Rotronics Wafadrive (1984)

[edit] External links

• Rotronics Wafadrive User Manual
• Review of Wafadrive in Sinclair User, December 1984