As the title says I've done it. Whatever Atari hadn't finished as a product, I did...a fully working external drive for the STBook. The official release of the STBook's disk drive never happened.  Few photos I was able to find (after my design finished of course).

Image source: thebrewingacademy.com

I've seen other implementations of adding a floppy drive to the STBook (as ACSI external device) but I took my own approach and redesigned the whole thing as Atari wanted....maybe with a little extra.

So this here is a  DD/HD Floppy Disk Drive and...wait for it......ACSI adapter. Yes, the drive has a port for the DMA, so you won't lose the option to use an external HDD with the STBook. Also saves the STBook to ACSI adapter because it is the usual 19  pin DMA port that you find traditionally on STs. Bring on the Megafiles!  I recently discovered few more photos so it seems that my idea matched Atari's plans about the DMA port.

One thing I sacrificed is the power/activity led on top, because the modern drives have this in the front and I thought two leds would be too much. The unit is very compact, was kept same size as the STBook and works in line with Atari's plans. It gets powered from the laptop, no external power supply needed. Automatically detects the use of HD/DD disks.

The name? I call it NSTF-144. The model number of the STBook is NST-141. From this, I added the F, following Atari's steps but changed the end to 144 to reflect the ability of using HD disks.

The drive works 100% and there is a box already designed. And I turned it into a fully boxed product.  

A longer video showing the use of a DD, then HD disk, plus reading the content of the CosmosEx connected to the drive's DMA port

Here is a video finishing the formatting (yes, some screen issues ..but this is my test STBook, will fix that)

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