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No fun with Floppy drives in a modern world

clh333 said:
I have two of the Chuanganzuhuo USB floppy 1.4 drives, each attached to a Win10 machine, and both are able to read from and write to floppy disks. Another brand of drive I tried earlier was not successful, so it may be partly the fault of the hardware.
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These are the good ones. (In fact they are also chingchangchung Ye-Data, but old ones)

format720_1.jpg
It's just working, Win 10 20H2 fully patched.

Maybe the trick is, attaching the drives not directly to the computer, but plug them on an active USB hub. Active means, it has it's own separate power supply. Computer's USB ports often seems to be too weak to supply USB floppy drives. That is also important for USB zip drives.

And if you prefer mechanically more stable drives, see this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Cable-...882919?hash=item4b6038cee7:g:h3UAAOSwOztciruc But I have no experience if they support also 720 kb diskettes. The offer only talks about 1.44 MB, like on those modern offers for 3,5 inch slim floppy drives with housing. . I will see end of january 2021, I have ordered one of these adapters just recently, it will take it's time to arrive from China.

But floppy is not the ideal media to transfer a huge amount of data from modern PC / Mac to old system. It's necessary for the beginnimg when the machine is not installed, but afterwards I prefer USB / Parallel Port / SCSI ZIP drives and ParCP-USB (which is something like laplink between Win XP...10 / Mac / Linux and Atari ST or MS-DOS (386SX and newer) on the old side). I just installed my Olivetti M380XP9, that's a huge 80386-33 tower using floppy to install MS-DOS and copy guest.exe onto it, and then transfered Windows 3.11 plus updates and software, DOS tools, Games, demos etc. over to it by ZIP drives. The machine has 350+650 MB SCSI drive and now both drives are 90% filled. Another simple way for data transfer is, if the old computer has IDE interface and can read FAT16 partitions, then I use Compactflash card with IDE adapter - this even works with Atari ST computers if they have IDE (like Falcon 030 does). Another experiment soon will be mtcp, I am unhappy about compatibility of network protocol between Win for Workgroups 3.11 and Win 10...
 
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So maybe at debian is some one maintaining it. I was in contact with the guy making the cpm floppy tools for Linux, and he told that his code today is mostly useless because floppy support was dropped.
 
Funny: picked up PianoDisc 720KB 3.5" diskettes today (free): proprietary format. Mostly bootlegs so I have already formatted some in MS-DOS 6.22. Cannot read them on my USB or NEC FDDs in proprietary format.

For large file transfers I simply burn CDs / DVDs as needed. Works fine.
 
USB floppy can only support standard format. UBS floppy acts like USB mass storage device, a block device like USB stick. Accessing USB floppy is without the computer knows something like track, sector, head, it is just block numbers. If you have diskette with non standard format, that is not suppported by USB floppy.
 
The PianoDisc diskettes are also not readable on a vintage machine. Probably need specific utility for it. Too much of a hassle.
 
UFI (see: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbmass-ufi10.pdf) is largely a reduced SCSI-2 command set over full-blown MSC; no magic properties conferred. While there is a MODE SELECT page that supposedly allows for specifying sector and track size, I've never run across a USB floppy drive where this was supported for other than the usual MSDOS default values.
 
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As a challenge, I reworked a Samsung SFD-321B 3.5" floppy drive to work as a third drive on my Durango F-85 machines. The original machine uses MPI 102 5.25" floppy drives (100 tpi, 5.25" DS) which are essentially a clone of the Micropolis 1015-4 drives. Utterly nonstandard when viewed from today; uses a single-row "Berg" type header for power and pinout is a bit different. The F-85 has a DC37F connector on the back, but it's not the IBM standard--the ribbon cable is shifted over to start with pin 1. I had to strap the 3.5" drive to provide READY rather than DISK CHANGED and provided a 5V "wall wart" for power.

I'd forgotten how fussy the F85 floppies were. They record 12 512-byte GCR-encoded sectors on 77 tracks at about 300 KHz; close to the bandpass limit of the drive at double-density. The standard formatting program makes 3 verification passes.

Still, it was nice seeing a floppy driver that I wrote in 1977 was still working. :)

What's remarkable is that after all these years, the two systems I have booted right up after years of sitting around--right down to the hard disks. I did have to clean one of the floppy drives, however.
 
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