I did some testing on my first Gotek, the one that was inadvertently hooked up to +12V rather than +5V. It was apparently dead but when I removed my USB drive, which was a gimmicky Vacuum Tube drive with a LED inside to simulate the filament glow, the rest of the Gotek appears to work okay. The USB drive took one for the team.
With a new USB drive in the Gotek, it comes right up and seems to be working fine. I will move it over to the 3174 once I make the diode wiring modification correctly. The IBM 3174 asserts DS1 for both drives, so they can both be set to S1 for access. It is the cabling on the 3174 that selects each drive with its own version of the DS1 selection line.
TESTED UNIT WITH NEW FLASH AND WORKS FINE
I was able to IML the controller from the image, thus I now have a pair of working Gotek drives updated with FlashFloppy and wired to work with the 3174. I ordered extra cables and adapters so that I can install both of the drives simultaneously.
BENEFITS OF DUAL FLOPPY DRIVE IN IBM 3174
In normal operation, the IBM 3174 will do the Initial Microprogram Load (IML) from the Control diskette image. It tries in order drive A, drive B, and the hard disk looking for a drive that is ready with an image mounted. If you have only one drive, no issue at all.
However, the Utility diskette image is used to configure the Control image, thus if you have only one drive you will need to 'swap diskettes' several times during the process. With the Gotek, that is a button push to change the image 'mounted' and then hit Enter on the terminal to proceed.
If you have twin floppy drives, one with each diskette image, the process requires no changes of image at all. Not a huge gain in time or reduction in steps taken, but I already have both drives so why not?
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