Technical characteristics of Rotronics Wafadrive

Brand: Rotronics
Type: Storage medias
Launched: 1984

The Rotronics Wafadrive, released in late 1984, was a magnetic tape storage peripheral designed for use with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer and intended to compete with the ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive produced by Sinclair itself.

The device consisted of two "continuous tape" drives, an RS-232 interface, and a Centronics parallel port. The drives could move tape at two speeds: high, for sequential searching, and low, for read/write, which was significantly slower than that of the Microdrive. The cartridges (or "wafers"), the same ones used in Entrepo stringy floppy drives for other microcomputers, were physically wider than the Microdrive cartridges. They were available in three different (nominal) capacities: 16 KB, 64 KB, or 128 KB.