Purchase a Rana Systems 1000 Floppy Disk Drive for your Atari 8-Bit Computer (10-15 mins)

Task: Purchase a Rana Systems 1000 Floppy Disk Drive for your Atari 8-Bit Computer

Needed: Web browser 

Time: 10-15 minutes

Introduction

There were several different brands of 5.25″ floppy drives available for the Atari 8-bit computers. Each had their own unique advantages and disadvantages. For example, I have previously posted about the Indus GT that many consider to be the best of the best. Here I cover the Rana Systems 1000 double-density floppy drive.

I have two Rana drives. The first I have had since the 1980s and comes in the original box. This was not working and I recently fixed it by replacing two bad logic chips (U2 & U6) and a faulty Intel 8031 MPU (U4). Some additional details are in my Atari Age forums post. I picked up my second Rana at VCF SoCal in 2024 and this one works great.

The Rana is nice because it shows you what track the drive is reading on an LED. It also has a number of built-in functions that are accessible through the touch controls on the front. For example, you can write protect a disk and can launch a number or error-checking routines. These are covered in the guide mentioned below.

Instructions

You can find these from time to time on eBay. These are a bit hard to find and you might need to pay more than $200 for one.

Here is the Rana installation guide from 1983.

Comments

I prefer the Indus GT drives to the Rana but am happy to have these.

Note that the Rana works fine with an Atari 1050 9v power supply.

These sold for around $350 in 1983.

Note Paul Alhart sells a Rana repair manual for $10. You can find his email mentioned on Atari Age.

There is a thread on Atari Age forums about replacing the ROM in the Rana to make it speedy. I have not tried this yet.

Below are photos of two different circuit boards for the Rana. The first, green, has a 12MHz Intel 8031chip as the CPU. The second, mustard, has a 6502. Wanted to get these in the post since there aren’t many photos of these boards online. I have also included schematics made by Jerzy Sobola for each board below since these are also hard to track down.