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Internal USB floppy drive on Desktop

I honestly don't think it matters, all that I've seen are based on jmicron chips, and can be purchased for like $10.

Just curious though, were there ever any black face LS120 or LS240 drives made? The only ones I've seen are beige.
 
There were certainly the black "slimline" LS120s made for laptops, but I don't know about the full-height ones.

I'm curious about the USB "Superdrive" LS-120 made for the Mac community. They appear to be an IDE (could also be parallel, I suppose) with a USB port replicator attached. Anyone know for certain?
 
Chuck(G) said:
There were certainly the black "slimline" LS120s made for laptops, but I don't know about the full-height ones.

I'm curious about the USB "Superdrive" LS-120 made for the Mac community. They appear to be an IDE (could also be parallel, I suppose) with a USB port replicator attached. Anyone know for certain?
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Are you talking about the iMac colored external drives? I believe I have one of those at home if you are...
 
The iMac look USB Superdrive is an internal IDE drive attached to a IDE to something adapter wrapped in a colorful plastic shell which is attached to cable that has USB on one end and some strange connector that attaches to the drive. There is a youtube video of someone disassembling a 1999 model which briefly shows the internal IDE connector.

A supporting link http://forums.macnn.com/t/50902/usb-superdisk-ide-superdisk-in-sheeps-clothes
 
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krebizfan said:
The iMac look USB Superdrive is an internal IDE drive attached to a IDE to something adapter wrapped in a colorful plastic shell which is attached to cable that has USB on one end and some strange connector that attaches to the drive. There is a youtube video of someone disassembling a 1999 model which briefly shows the internal IDE connector.
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That's the one I was talking about. That weird connector (looks like a shrunken SCSI connector) looks as if it might have some active devices in the plug end. Those units any good? You can get them for a fraction of what a regular IDE LS-120 drive sells for.
 
Chuck(G) said:
That's the one I was talking about. That weird connector (looks like a shrunken SCSI connector) looks as if it might have some active devices in the plug end. Those units any good? You can get them for a fraction of what a regular IDE LS-120 drive sells for.
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It worked well for the one person I know who had one for about 10 years before the read/write heads failed. The connector wasn't as sturdy as I would like so I think a good number of those being sold no longer work reliably as USB drives but the IDE internals are salvageable. I think that some of the parallel port drive models were constructed similarly so drives sold without power supplies might be another good source for cheap IDE internal drives.

MSFN in their forums has a lengthy thread involving comparison of the various sub-models of LS-120 which might be helpful.
 
Chuck(G) said:
That's the one I was talking about. That weird connector (looks like a shrunken SCSI connector) looks as if it might have some active devices in the plug end. Those units any good? You can get them for a fraction of what a regular IDE LS-120 drive sells for.
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I worked with some of those back in the Windows 2000 timeframe when they were new. The USB bridge chip is in that external plug gizmo. I forget who made the bridge chip. Maybe OnSpec. The other common bridge chip vendor at the time was In-System Design, later acquired by Cypress.

Mechanically the external plug gizmo on those translucent grey and teal LS-120 drives never seemed to be a very solid connection.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I still have a pile of new Caleb IDE drives. I wonder if an IDE-to-USB converter will do the trick there. If so, I've got my answer.
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If those are ATAPI drives and they support the 0x23 Read Format Capacities request then I would expect that they should probably work and be recognized as a floppy drive by Windows when attached through an USB-ATA/ATAPI bridge.
 
Okay, I ordered a couple of them. Will try them with both LS120 and Caleb drives.

I also ordered up stuff for my USB-floppy-in-a-card-reader slot suggestion. If it doesn't work right, I can always use it in another system with regular floppy support.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I checked that with my SmartDisk external USB floppy and it handles 720K (as well as DOS-V 1.23M floppies) very nicely.
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Off-topic, but NEC PC-98 DOS is NOT DOS/V. DOS/V refers to Japanese DOS for PC/AT compatibles with VGA cards.
 
Curious, because I've seen Microsoft literature that refers to it that way. That isn't to say that Microsoft knows/knew the right terminology. But why there should be a special term for an OS with a VGA driver is puzzling.
 
NEC had an association with a San Diego-area outfit (it may have been a division of NEC, I can't remember) that served as a conduit to the US about the PC98 architecture. You could purchase machines, documents and software from them. I think I still have some of their literature in my files.

I think that WDDJ had a short series on PC98 software requirements some years back.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Glenn, I still use floppies quite a bit, in particular to transfer data to older non-network equipped machines. My latest system lacks both PATA (so I can't use an LS120 drive) and legacy floppy interfaces--just has USB and SATA. I despise littering my workarea with little boxes on cables.

Do you hae any suggestions?
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I am late to the discussion but how about PCIe PATA card? I am sure cheaper ones can be found and going forward it may be the only solution.

As for slimline to HH - I searched high and low for these a few years back (to use slim line ls-240 drives) w/out any luck. Not a very common item, even though it seems like a no brainer...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Okay, I ordered a couple of them. Will try them with both LS120 and Caleb drives.

I also ordered up stuff for my USB-floppy-in-a-card-reader slot suggestion. If it doesn't work right, I can always use it in another system with regular floppy support.
Click to expand...

Chuck,

I'd be interested in if you get the USB-IDE to work specially with LS240 drive. I ahve an LS240 drive on my "current" system through a STD. IDE port. However, it no longer works as a boot drive.
 
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