Floppy drives
Floppy drives! Or... do you really need them?
Do you still have your collection of floppy disks from back then? Are you planning on starting a collection of old Big Box games and install them? Just want to buy old disk collections at garage sales or flea markets?
If the answer to the above is no, then you don't need floppy drives. It will, however, make your life easier, if you do have a floppy drive - but not necessarily a real one. What do I mean? Well, you may have seen the GoTek drives, that slots in to a 3½" bay, and with a USB flash drive acts like a floppy drive. This will provide you with a way to (first of all) install DOS, and to have something resembling diskettes for downloaded disk images.
If you're planning on installing Windows 9x or have some old games on CD lying around), you of course need a CD-ROM drive. If you don't have any and don't plan on buying any, it doesn't really make sense unless you still have a CD-burner in your everyday computer, should you happen to download an ISO-file of an old game.
For pure DOS, you do not need a DVD drive, DVDs usually use the UDF file system, which DOS (and Windows 95) cannot read. WInodws 98 have limited supprt for UDF. This also applies to Windows 98SE.
Can I have more than two floppy drives?
Yes - and no...
In the original specification from IBM, the floppy controller did in fact support four drives - two internal and two external. As nobody really had the need to have more than two 5¼" 360 K drives, later controllers removed the support for the external drives.
You can finde floppy controllers where you can set the controller address with jumpers on the board and make it a secondary controller, but they won't work, unless you computers BIOS has built-in support for four drives (these are very rare). Apart from specialized programs than can address the controllers directly, DOS can only see what the BIOS tells it is there.
The solution is four-drive controllers - that is, a floppy controller that has two floppy channels and its own on-board BIOS, that extends the capabilities of the PCs own BIOS. Beware, though - not all four-drive controllers have their own on-board BIOS, which means it still relies on the PCs BIOS to support four drives - most of them don't!
There is another possibilty, called...
LS-120, aka. The Super Disk Drive
The Laser-Servo 120 MB drive came around 1996-1997. It was made for a special disk that resembled the 3½" disk, but could hold 120 MB. They are backwards compatible with standard 3½" disks, so they can read and write them - sometimes it can even read disks that normal drives can't, due to its smaller read/write head. This also means that you can have problems reading a disk written a LS-120 drive in a normal drive, in the same way that a 5¼" 360 K drive can have problems reading a 360 K disk written in a 1,2 MB drive.
The point here is, that it can be used as a third floppy drive, because it connects via IDE, and not the floppy cable. This dos mean that it requires drivers to work under DOS, at a cost of a bit of conventional memory, but on the upside, it is faster at both reading and writing standard disks. You cannot boot from it, though, unless your motherboard supports booting from LS-120.
Apparantly LS-120 drives are not exactly reliable when used with 120 MB disks, but for 1.44 there should be no problems.
