Working with the Amiga Floppy Drives

You must keep your high density floppy drive clean

There are a lot of problems that come from failing high density floppy drives.

The symptoms are not a total failure, but errors while reading, writing, or formatting high density disks. If you have problems using high density disks, but no problem with Double Density DD disks the problem is most often due to a build up of dust in the drive. I would suspect that first before calling it an actual failure. This is most common in the Amiga 3000, where the power supply fan sucks air directly through the floppy drives.

The problem comes from the slow speed of disk rotation when working with high density disks. The Amiga HD drives turn at 150 rpm when the drive senses a disk with the extra hole indicating a higher capacity floppy.
When a double density disk is inserted, the drive turns at 300 rpm.
Therefore the data has more chances to be read by the drive while turning at the higher speed.

The solution is rather simple. Remove the entire drive from the computer, remove the top metal shield from the drive, and use one of those cans of compressed air to blow all the dust, hair, and collected grunge out of the drive. Also, get a 'floppy drive cleaning disk' and run it about 15 times in the drive. This will really clean the read/write heads of the floppy drive.

Advice of your Amiga doctor is that you, A3000 owners do this cleaning ritual twice a year, all you others once a year.