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)


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