PC-9881

PC-9881
Made for: PC-9800 series
Manufacturer: NEC
Release Date RRP Code JP 198x

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The PC-9881 "Disk Unit" is a set of two 8-inch floppy disk drives for the PC-9801. It is the PC-9800 series equivalent of the earlier PC-8800 series PC-8881 unit (which is largely identical, save for branding).

At the time of PC-9801's launch, the PC-9881 was the only official floppy disk drive available, and it was expensive; several times the price of the computer itself. It is assumed the PC-9881 can read all 8-inch disk formats, the highest being the (double sided) single density disk ("2D"), which when formatted for the PC-9801, could store 1.2MB of data.

PC-9801 games distributed on 8-inch floppy disk are rare, as the format was displaced within the year with 5¼-inch drives, first seen in the PC-9801 F. While these initial 5¼-inch drives could only store 640KB of data, most games of the era did not require this much space, so it was worthwhile trade-off when also considering the lower manufacturing costs.

8-inch drives were never built into any PC-9800 series computers, so the PC-9881 remained the only official option for loading 8-inch floppy disks. Revisions were released as the PC-9881K and PC-9881N, though the differences are not currently known.

NEC sold PC-9881s in two configurations; one with the drives facing left, and another facing right.