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Internal USB floppy drive on Desktop

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

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I'm curious to discover if anyone's incorporated an internal USB floppy drive on their desktop. You can purchase Teac FD-05U drives fairly inexpensively; I'd like to see if someone has solved the mounting issue of a "slimline" 3.5" drive.
 
This is an interesting idea, I can find those Dell D-Series floppy drives everywhere, and working with one of those it shouldn't be too hard to pull one apart for the internal drive and circuitry, mount that inside the case and then cut a hole in a floppy bay plate or something so it can be used. The reason for keeping the Dell circuitry is that it has a USB port on it, allowing them to be used as external drives as well as in a laptop. Making a cable from the on-board USB header to the drive wouldn't be too hard, even less if you pull a USB header off an old case and then use a plain cable.

I need to try this when I get home, I've been needing a floppy drive and external is a bit of a pain.
 
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?
 
My "desktop" is actually a Dell D610 in a docking station, so when I need a floppy drive I just pop out the DVD-RW and pop in the 3.5" floppy. Modifying one of those Dell floppy drives to fit a standard case would be a pain. I've got a Teac external around her somewhere, it wouldn't be that hard to mount one in a 5.25" drive bay and make a faceplate for it. It's a bit wide for a 3.5" bay.
 
I can think of a lot of solutions for a USB floppy being mounted internally.... unfortunately all of them involve a dremel, a few quick brackets to the slot cover as well as for to the drive cage, and superglue. Lots of superglue. Obviously, this is not the most elegant of solutions.

I'm in the process of building a new desktop computer for myself now, and find myself wondering if Windows 8 even has floppy support (I haven't checked into it).
 
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?
Click to expand...
This might work with a (rare) laptop style LS-120 and a laptop IDE to SATA adapter. It would be a bit kludgy, but it would be off the workbench.


Another option might be one of those el-cheap-o card reader/floppy setups designed to go in a 3.5 floppy opening. Inevitably, they have a standard legacy floppy connector, but you could strip out that mechanism and replace it with the one from a standard slimline USB floppy. Bonus points if you have a USB card or port on the motherboard that accepts Type A USB connections internally.

Or for that matter, have you tried a PATA to SATA adapter on a standard LS120 drive or an add in PATA card for the LS120?
 
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Chuck(G),

If you can find one, Buslink made a USB Floppy Drive (Model FDD-1) which used a standard 3.5" floppy drive. You could easily take it apart and mount everything inside the case. Here's a link to the drive on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006BAJ2

310525_640.jpg

Unfortunately, they didn't seem to produce them very long. I've been lucky enough to find two in the past, one of which is still brand new in the box.

Please let us know if you find something that works well for you.

Heather
 
Here's a possible solution. Get one of these:
NM-003-unit.jpg

and replace the legacy floppy with a drive from an external box. Same mounting footprint.
 
Wonder what sort of interest exists for a XT-FDC-like project but using USB instead? It would not be a hobby friendly assembly, but would be a simple board with just a MCU emulating a mass storage class and a super I/O chip handling the floppy interface. Though you could probably put a PIC on the XT-FDC board design and start from there for a much larger but friendlier board design.
 
eeguru said:
Wonder what sort of interest exists for a XT-FDC-like project but using USB instead? It would not be a hobby friendly assembly, but would be a simple board with just a MCU emulating a mass storage class and a super I/O chip handling the floppy interface. Though you could probably put a PIC on the XT-FDC board design and start from there for a much larger but friendlier board design.
Click to expand...

Given the command-level abstraction of USB mass storage, you'd have more than enough cycles to do the whole thing in a modestly-sized ARM or PIC32 MCU--and you get USB support free; probably no external logic chips if you've got 5V-tolerant inputs and a relatively modern drive. For old legacy drives that need outputs to sink more current, you'd have to include some buffering. But there's more than enough CPU there.
 
I use an internal LS120 drive with an IDE to USB adapter. Even shows up as A: in Windows.
 
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