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fluxengine/doc/disk-fb100.md
2025-08-20 21:23:02 +02:00

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fb100
====
## 100kB 3.5" 40-track SSSD
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The Brother FB-100 is a serial-attached smart floppy drive used by a several
different machines for mass storage, including the Tandy Model 100 and
clones, the Husky Hunter 2, and (bizarrely) several knitting machines. It was
usually rebadged, sometimes with a cheap paper label stuck over the Brother
logo, but the most common variant appears to be the Tandy Portable Disk Drive
or TPDD:
<div style="text-align: center">
<a href="http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=233&st=1"> <img src="tpdd.jpg" alt="A Tandy Portable Disk Drive"/></a>
</div>
It's a bit of an oddball: the disk encoding is FM with a very custom record
scheme: 40-track single-sided 3.5" disks storing 100kB or so each. Each track
had only _two_ sectors, each 1280 bytes, but with an additional 12 bytes of
ID data used for filesystem management.
There was also apparently a TPDD-2 which could store twice as much data, but
I don't have access to one of those disks.
## Options
(no options)
## Examples
To read:
- `fluxengine read -c fb100 -s drive:0 -o fb100.img`
## References
- [Tandy Portable Disk Drive operations
manual](http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Tandy/Portable%20Disk%20Drive%20Operation%20Manual.pdf)
- [Tandy Portable Disk Drive service
manual](https://archive.org/details/TandyPortableDiskDriveSoftwareManual26-3808s)
- [TPDD design notes (including a dump of the
ROM)](http://bitchin100.com/wiki/index.php?title=TPDD_Design_Notes)
- [Knitting machine FB-100
resources](http://www.k2g2.org/wiki:brother_fb-100)