History (1976): Shugart SA 400 Minifloppy Disk Drive

This article was published by Southwest Technical Products Corporation written by Michael Holley.

Shugart SA 400 minifloppy Disk Drive

The compact SA 400 minifloppy disk drive offers a reliable low cost, high performance alternative to OEM data storage applications where tope cassette units would have been previously considered.

The minifloppy drive is about one-half the size of Shugart’s standard SA 800 floppy disk drive, fitting comfortably in the space allocated for most cassette units.

The SA 400 drives were single sided with 35 tracks, later models were double sided with 40 tracks. The unformatted capacity was 3,125B per track for a total of 109,375B. When formatted with 256B sectors at 10 sectors per track, the capacity was 896,000B.

Introduced by Shugart Associates in late 1976 and was in production by early 1977. It costs $425.