Reading an almost 50-year-old 8-Inch Floppy Disk on a Modern Computer

In this video I test a Siemens FDD 200-8P 8-inch floppy disk drive that was given to me by a museum to verify whether it still works and to figure out exactly what it needs to be powered and connected again. I inspect the mechanics, clean the heads, work out the mains and DC power requirements, connect the 50-pin Shugart interface through a 50-to-34-pin adapter, and use a Greaseweazle to control the drive from a modern computer. The good news: the drive works. The spindle runs properly, the heads seek correctly, Track 0 is detected, and I was able to image a hard-sectored 8-inch floppy disk to an SCP flux image. One slightly alarming moment came when Greaseweazle reported around 11,000 RPM. The drive was fine — the hard-sector holes were being counted as index pulses. Once divided by 32, the actual spindle speed comes out at roughly the expected 360 RPM. I also loaded the SCP image into HxC Floppy Emulator to verify that the heads were actually reading flux transitions from the disk surface. For anyone working with one of these drives: the mains connector I ended up using is TE Connectivity 1-480700-0. I also found a well-documented 8-inch floppy power pigtail / breakout board available from TexElec, which may save some time if you are putting together a similar setup. After noticing my previous uploads were quieter than intended I paid much closer attention to the overall audio level in this video. Let me know what you think. I am already planning on getting a better microphone for voiceovers so that the scenes don't sound like shot on different days. Hardware / software used: Siemens FDD200-8P Greaseweazle 50-pin to 34-pin floppy adapter HxC Floppy Emulator software TE Connectivity 1-480700-0 mains connector MeanWell dual-output 12v / 5v power supply 12v-24v boost converter Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:23 Floppy size comparison 0:40 Initial inspection 01:24 Cleaning the heads 01:31 Power requirements 01:43 First power-up 02:09 50-pin adapter and Greaseweazle 02:52 Head seek test 03:11 Hard-sectored floppy and 11,000 RPM 03:39 Imaging the disk 04:15 Viewing the SCP flux image in HxC 04:36 Conclusion