Amiga 1020 Floppy Disk Drive

This mysterious drive appeared in an eBay sale. I’m not sure how long the ad will survive in their archive but check it out. I was willing to bid on the package even though the A1000 does not hold an attraction for me. My plan was to only keep the 1020 and resell everything else. My planned high bid of $750 was nothing compared to the $1600+ the package went for.

From what I’ve gathered online, the 1020 was the connection between the DOS and Amiga OS world when it came to using 360Kb disks. As someone who still plays with the A2088 in my A2000 this drive is of interest to me. Was there ever an internal model of this? I’m guessing no since a standard 5 1/4″ PC drive connects to the A2088/A20286/A20386 boards.

The 1020 can also be used on the Amiga side to save and retrieve data. It seems like most people didn’t bother though. You have to perform the mounting and disk changes manually. And, the 360Kb was less than the default 3 1/2″ drive’s 880Kb storage.

Each drive was sold with a copy of a PC-emulator called “The Transformer”. Some of the 1020 utilized an ALPS mechanism. When you compare the C-128’s 1571 drive and the 1020 it is easy to see that one-case-to-rule-them-all was in play.

Some people have stated that great care had to be taken when shipping. The circuit board had too much weight (transformer?) connected to it and rough handling could break the board.

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