Your SY99 is equiped with a 3½" Double Density MSX-type Disk Drive. This drive supports common 3½" DD floppy diskettes. MSX is an old 8 bit computer standard and this drive type was also used in older Yamaha music computers. Some people say, that MSX used 3" rather than 3½" drives. However, we claim that the only disk drive that can be used with the SY99/77 is the drive manufactured directly by YAMAHA.

Make sure you protect the disk drive when shipping or flying your synthesizer.

Never use High Density (HD) or Extra High Density (EHD) disks with your synthesizer. You might encounter severe problems when re-using these diskettes on other computer systems (e.g. read fault errors or data errors).

Do NOT use directories (folders) when storing data on your diskette. Sub-directories may NOT be accessed within the SY99.

Files are recognized by their extensions. File extensions can have up to three alphanumeric letters. Each file extension has a different meaning. You can store up to 99 files per file type. For compatibility reasons, file names should only consist of uppercase letters and should not contain special characters.

If two files have exactly the same file extension only the first one will be shown when browsing the diskette with your synthesizer. You may access the second one by renaming or deleting the first file.

The appendix of the SY99 Operating Manual contains a list of supported file extensions.

Don't trust on ATTRIB read-only settings when storing files on a diskette. The SY99 will overwrite both software-protected and not-protected files. If you want to go sure, apply the 3½” “hardware” write-protection.

If your disk drive got damaged, contact Yamaha Corp for replacement. You can not use standard 3½" disk drives (used e.g. with PC or Macintosh), as they are NOT compatible with the SY99 floppy disk controller. One of the main reasons might be the different data transfer speed (1,44M disk drives are much faster than 720K disk drives). Another topic to mention is, that if a controller supports multiple types of diskette drives, there should be a switch (DIP, jumper, BIOS setting) to select the appropriate drive type.

Due to this, the internal SY99 floppy drive cannot be upgraded e.g. to support 1,44M HD (high density) or 2,88M EHD (extra high density) floppy diskettes.

If you format your disk using the SY99 instead of using a standard PC or a Macintosh, disk access is said to be faster because of better interleave settings. However, we think that the disk drive is still very slow. Do diskettes really have an interleave at all ? We don't think so. If you know a way to accelerate the floppy, don't hesitate and share your experience.

SY99 may format your 3½” floppy disk automatically, without asking you for permission!

This happens if your SAVE ALL operation flows to the second disk, and the second disk is not empty. After inserting the 2nd disk and answering 'yes' to the question requesting for it ... whang bang ... it is nice to watch the extinction of your 2 weeks work!

This side-effect will not arise if you do not have memory expansions installed, as your data will thus never ever overflow to a second disk when storing an ALL DATA backup.