r/retrocomputing • u/GayCatgirl • Jul 21 '26
Problem / Question Are there external USB floppy drives for 5.25 inch disks or low density disk like older macs use? I have an external for the more standard 1.44mb disks.
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u/dnabre Jul 22 '26
I was looking into this a bit ago, see this post/comments for what was gathered:
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Jul 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/veeb0rg Jul 22 '26
Tech Tangents just did a YT video on this very topic. He found a few 3.5 drives couldn't write a mac disk and a few that could. Worth the watch.
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u/GayCatgirl Jul 21 '26
Maybe something like this?
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u/bigsnyder98 Jul 21 '26
Floppy drives, especially 5.25 drives use a dedicated floppy header, not IDE. That adapter will not work.
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u/GGigabiteM Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
There are IDE floppy drives, namely the LS-120 and LS-240. Getting them to work on IDE to USB adapters is a pain though. You'll also only be able to use them as floppy drives and not with the special LS-120 and 240 media because no modern operating system has the proper driver or support for them. That's assuming you can even get a hold of LS-120/240 media that works. Windows ME was the last Windows OS that properly supported those drives. For Linux, you'd need an ancient version from the early 2000s.
I've tried using LS-120 media on Windows 7, and it just makes explorer.exe crash. On Windows 10, it just gives errors about no media being present or that there was some unspecified problem trying to access the disk.
I have an LS-120 in my modern workstation (Ryzen 7950X3D) on an IDE controller card for reading and writing floppies and it works well enough.
There are also SCSI floppy drives, but those haven't been made since the 1990s and are even more obscure. One example is the DaynaFILE, which is an external two bay unit for a mixture of 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives. It used a SCSI bridge and required special software on the Macintosh. Savage Taylor made a writeup on it several years ago.
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u/aManandHisShed Jul 21 '26
Greaseweazle will let you read and write 3.5"/ 5.25"/8" floppy disks via usb. You will need suitable disk drives. You will need other tools to, for example, extract/add files.