For more information on the Shugart SA400L, see the following page on my external RX180 dual drive. Watch out the steprate! Modern drives have steprates from about 6 or 3 ms! Older 8" drives have 10 ms.

You need an old computer (floppy disk controller) to run this slow drives! For example an IBM PC 5150, N* Horizon, IMSAI or Altair. Perfectly suitable for the single-density format (FM).

There are different versions of the R/W heads. One is the well-known „tunnel erase“ (TE) and the other is the „straddle erase“ (SE). I only know the SE from the old Shugart drives; the TE from all TEAC drives.

• Shugart OEM Manual (en), 1982 (1,3 MByte)
• Shugart Disk drives, Brochure (en), 1981 (4,7 MByte)

1. (↑) Shugart Disk Drives, March 1981
2. (↑) Shugart SA 400 Brochure, August 1976