Atari XF551 E-bay finds

Mark2008 · October 2, 2022

Well, I picked up a couple of XF551 from e-bay germany. I'm writing this post before they arrive.

From the auction photos one looked clean, but not tested. One looks like garbage, but sold as tested working.

Both purchased from sellers willing to ship overseas. Still many german sellers won't ship overseas, but there is a workaround.

There are ship forwarders that allow you to put a german shipping address on your account, so you can buy from german ebay sellers. So, basically xf551 shows up far more regularly on ebay.de. With a ship forwarder, you can bid on those auctions and have them ship to your german address, provided by a company like forward2me. The ship forward handles shipping to you - at an outrageous shipping markup, basically...anyway, luckily I didn't actually have to try forward2me, so one complication removed. Cosmoshop shipped one of the drives, for only 40 euros.

My goal here is to finish my "ultimate" Atari setup, as follows: Atari 130XE w/VBXE and dual XF551, plus fujinet. SDX on cartridge.

Of course, I've been building and re-building my ultimate Atari setup for a decade, so perhaps this one wont stick either, but I think it will. The reason is, in my mind I've given up on having a hard drive - and intentionally want a dual floppy setup. I've given up on 65c816 expansions too - the hobby is 8-bit. May as well stick with that limitation.

For a couple weeks now, I've been using this setup, albeit with 1050 drives lin lieue of xf551 arrive - and I really like it. The xf551 will comple the look, plus they are 2x sio speed, plus 360k will help with space.

Anyway, waiting on 2 drives, one advertised working, one advertised as not tested. Both could work, or neither might work....the story here is will buying things from random folks in germany work well, or, could something go wrong?

the suspense...the drama....stay tuned