Are there any 5.25 inch floppy disk USB drives?
Posted by E-Lee-Za@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 63 comments
I went to a museum yesterday and bought a 5.25 inch floppy drive from the gift shop as a souvenir. I'm thinking of actually trying to code something and store it on the disk, perhaps to run on an old computer if I get the chance. I know there are some floppy disk drives with USB connectivity for modern computers, but it seems they are all for 3.5 inch floppies. Is there any way I can connect the floppy I bought to my computer?
JasonMckin@reddit
It's kinda sad actually. I still have a ton of old 5.25's with old games, etc, and the idea that I may never be able to read the media again is kinda depressing.
s71n6r4y@reddit
If you really care, just back them up with a Greaseweazle or an old PC.
JasonMckin@reddit
GW is viable....Not sure about "old PC." Because you need a daisy chain of media and interfaces to move the data to a modern PC. My old 286 with a 5.25 drive didn't have USB ports, didn't have Ethernet, didn't have wifi, didn't have an OS with a TCP/IP stack. At best, I'd need a computer with a 5.25 and 3.5 since they have USB 3.5 drives.
darthuna@reddit
Your old 286 computer can support two drives. You can use it to transfer everything from 5.25" to 3.5", then buy a $15 3.5" USB drive to read the disks on a modern computer.
JasonMckin@reddit
Yes that was the last sentence in my comment.
darthuna@reddit
Well, since you were talking about "your 286" and your last sentence referred to "a computer", I thought your 286 had two 5.25" drives and I was suggesting replacing one with a 3.5" instead of finding another computer that has the two different drives.
CoverOk899@reddit
For your 286, could you use serial port transfer?
s71n6r4y@reddit
Certainly! Or parallel, or modem, or a USB-IDE adapter for the HDD, or a Soundblaster..
hamburgler26@reddit
ISA Ethernet cards exist and aren’t too hard to get working in Dos thanks to mbrutman’s mTCP stack.
JasonMckin@reddit
I’m impressed if you have a modern PC either a serial or parallel port and an IDE adapter 🤓
s71n6r4y@reddit
I do, but they aren't all that impressive. Very easily acquired!
CoverOk899@reddit
Depends on the motherboard. I have two modern PCs with serial ports. No parallel port or IDE though. You can buy PCIe parallel port cards though.
echocomplex@reddit
There are no usb 5.25 drives. You can make one at great expense if you buy what's called a grease weasel. Or the cheaper option, you could buy an old computer with a working drive and use that to read and write to the disk.
rjchute@reddit
Wouldn't recommend a greaseweasel for what OP wants, but there are USB-to-34-pin floppy adapters out there meant to work with internal floppy drives... Not sure if they would work with 360k/1.2Mb 5.25" drive, or if it just assumes 1.44Mb 3.5" drive...
darthuna@reddit
The adapters support 1.44MB only.
TheMage18@reddit
It supports 180K/360K/12.MB/720K/1.44MB drives and disk formats. It's one of the parameters you have to provide when you run the utility to read a disk to an image or write an image back to a disk.
darthuna@reddit
He's talking about the adapters, and they only support 1.44Mb.
TheMage18@reddit
Ahhh, yup, misread it as saying the GW only supported 1.44MB, my mistake.
jimmpony@reddit
I have a Kaypro with 5.25" drives. Bootstrapping that was a fun challenge. I tried first buying some CPM disks on eBay which were supposed to have Kermit on one but they were the wrong version or something. Some worked and had a form of BASIC which I theoretically might have been able to make a file copy program from to use the serial port, but I got some other thing to let the system read an SD card as a floppy instead - it took a lot of trial and error to figure out the right format and properly copy Kermit onto it but eventually it worked, and now I use the system with the two stock drives again. Made sure to make a lot of copies of the OS disk with Kermit. Got a box of 5.25" disks that says "Made in West Germany" on it that I like to point out to people, they work great.
tyttuutface@reddit
The Greaseweazle doesn't do that. It's for reading raw flux data.
CodeToManagement@reddit
Greaseweazel can write to disk so you could code something on a modern computer and write it to disk it’s just there would be some steps involved to compile the code and put the output into some kind of disk image format
isecore@reddit
There might be some technical limitation that I am unaware of, but mostly I think it's because a lack of demand. Even for 3.5" I think the demand these days is very limited but for a 5.25" it's even more obscure.
Occasionally I've toyed with the idea of butchering a 3.5" and attempting to graft the interface onto a 5.25" but haven't gotten around to doing that yet, especially since even for my needs it's a very obscure thing to Frankenstein together.
darthuna@reddit
I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to use a raspberry-pico and a floppy disk controller chip to create a 5.25" USB drive. I'm not talking about Greazeweasle, I'm talking about a USB drive that works like a regular 3.5" external USB drive, but 5.25".
Many people say that the main obstacle is the 12V that a 5.25" drive requires, which is ridiculous, just use an external PSU.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
And that is exactly it.
It must be remembered, USB was not standardized until 1996 (and not common until after 1998). And by that time 5¼" was already an obsolete standard that most computers were no longer coming with. Pretty much every desktop and laptop had an actual 3½" drive, and by around 1997 USB 3½" was easy to find.
But in the three decades since then, I can honestly say I have never seen a USB 5¼" drive. If any needed data on that format for say a laptop, they would just use a desktop with both and transfer the data to a 3½" disk.
TheMage18@reddit
Plus most 5.25" drives also require 12v for the head stepper motors, which is tough to do off a 5v 500mAh power source.
Even the Greaseweazle/Kryoflux require you to power 5.25" drives separately from the "controller" unit.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
Which was actually common for almost any USB storage in that era. Especially hard drives and CD-ROMs. Even the 3½" drives needed external power.
Gerd_Watzmann@reddit
And don't forget Firewire ... external Firewire-harddisks / DVD drives / scanner / video-grabber etc. were a thing back then. Firewire delivered way more power than the original USB, was initially faster, used DMA and didn't need a host. For a few years, Firewire was the better USB ... But since integration into Windows PCs never really became standard, it remained a niche mainly for Apple and Sony (video cameras) and was ultimately overtaken by the further development of USB.
And there also never was a 5,25 Firewire floppy drive 😅
isecore@reddit
Somewhere in my junk I have a ca 2008 hard-drive enclosure for 2.5" sata drives that solved it by requiring to be plugged into two USB ports. Occasionally there was a drive that would run fine just using one of the pigtails but most required both.
TheMage18@reddit
Yup! Exactly. I still have the cable that came with a DVDRW drive that had two plugs to combine power off two USB ports to power the drive.
LVL90DRU1D@reddit
imagine 8" floppy USB drive
anotherspaceguy100@reddit
This guy retros.
isecore@reddit
Now that would be a rare and wonderful beast to bring to your local coffee-shop for some archiving needs.
Distribution-Radiant@reddit
And nobody has actually made floppy drives in ages - most of the 3.5" USB drives are just salvaged laptop drives slapped into a USB case.
darthuna@reddit
What museum has 5.25" for sale at the gift shop?
guiverc@reddit
I have a USB devices with many connectors, which include disk (pATA & SATA) as well as another for 3.5" & 5.25" floppy drives purchased long ago at computer swap meets.
You needed to power the drive as well; but it did allow a USB (2.0 at best; if not slower (1.x)) to connect to 3.5" or 5.25" floppies.
They were NOT intended for long term use, useful (to me) mostly in confirming hardware worked/failed using a secondary source beyond the box you were doing maintenance on (took far less room than another box which is what was mostly used).
Liquid_Magic@reddit
Yes and No. Things like Greaseweazle and KyroFlux can do things. There’s a read only adapter for 5.25 pc / Schugart drives to USB. There’s a YouTube video of someone who took a 3.5 usb floppy and modded it to take a 5.25 drive and got it kinda working enough to boot to FreeDOS I think. Those are mostly the main options. There’s also ZoomFloppy but that’s for Commodore drives. Also SIO2PC is a USB to Atari 8-bit cable that I believe supports reading and writing to Atari computers and drives.
Honestly Greaseweazle is the way to go. It’s amazing! It’ll let you read and write disk images. Way way way better than KyroFlux. I have both and KyroFlux is a pain in the ass.
You’ll need a disk image file manger to put files in and out of a disk image file. If all you want is the fun of using a big ass old school floppy drive then you could stick to ms-dos format and use something like WinImage to create and manage a disk image in 5.25 360k format and then use Greaseweazle to write and read it. You could also use the 1.2 MB high-density disks if your drive is an 80-track HD drive. That would give you a little more room. For reference I think a text only copy of the Gutenberg Bible is about 4 MB so as far as plain text goes floppy disks were genuinely useful in that context.
I’m currently also working on a GUI for Greaseweazle that makes things drag and drop easy! It’s almost beta 1 done. It’ll be on my github. I’ll post it to this subreddit when I’m ready. There are other GUI apps for Greaseweazle. The old FluxEngine software supports Greaseweazle and its GUI was almost comfortable enough that I almost didn’t make my own GUI. But then the author switched to an ImHex based tool. It’s super fancy with lots of features but I wanted the opposite. I’ll be posting mine soon!
Good luck and cheers!
asterisk_14@reddit
As has been said, there are no simple 5.25" USB floppy drives. Also as has been said, a Greaseweazle is your best bet, once you add in a way to power the drive. If you just want to copy files off the disks, you can skip the flux imaging and read the discs directly via the Greaseweazle using DiskFlashback from Rob Smith:
https://robsmithdev.co.uk/diskflashback
Install it and Windows will see the Greaseweazle drive as a standard floppy.
HTX-713@reddit
Couldn't you find a scsi floppy drive and get an adapter for SAS since it's backwards compatible with the scsi protocol? Then pass that through to a Windows 95 VM or whatever the latest version that supports 5.25 in floppy drives?
anotherspaceguy100@reddit
It's certainly not impossible, but 5.25 drives generally require 12V and a fair bit of power, so they would need to have an external power supply, unlike the cheap 3.5" drives you see - note these can generally only read DOS formatted disks. I too have a need for a 5.25" to real old DOS (and some other formats if possible) floppies; I'm looking to find an old tower case and assemble a machine with some kind of old Windows version. Or hell, FreeDOS.
scubascratch@reddit
You could get a greaseweazle and connect any 5.25” drive to any modern PC with USB (you will need a 12v power supply), no need to build out a whole PC just to read the disks. The greaseweazle will be able to do a multipass flux level read which is way more likely to recover the data on the disk than an ancient PC relying on the ancient analog disk controller to recover the fading marginal signal.
anotherspaceguy100@reddit
Yeah, I'm not trying to recover old data, and in truth my use case for the 5 1/4" drive is small; what I'm really wanted to build is a Windows bridge machine, for various misc uses including running old windows software (maybe) - it's really all the things I haven't thought of yet. I can probably make do with my tower macs and modern Linux laptop, and yes, GW remains an option. However, if I'm going to build out an old PC, then I'll definitely want to put a 5 1/4" floppy in it.
2raysdiver@reddit
Just run a molex extension from your PC's PSU. Molex has both 12v and 5v power. The 5.25 drives all used the 12v power. The smaller connector for 3.5" drives would use either the 12v or 5v line depending on the model.
anotherspaceguy100@reddit
Uh OK. I think we're having a different conversation. I'm not asking about how to fit a drive in a tower, only that I plan to get one. I'm painfully aware of how ATX power supplies work.
2raysdiver@reddit
I'm just saying that you could run that molex extension outside the PC instead of buying an external power supply.
In your case, an older PC would be fine. Something from the early 2000s or earlier. Windows XP would probably work. Windows 98 definitely would. I have an old PC I bring out occasionally that has 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives and USB ports just so I can read the occasional floppy disc I find and transfer the data to a USB thumb drive. I don't recall if it has 98 or XP, though.
anotherspaceguy100@reddit
Again you seem to have having a conversation with someone else. My current PC is a laptop. I didn't ask for any of this advice.
eulynn34@reddit
There are devices that will let you attach a 5.25" drive to USB... Greaseweazle is one such device.
I have one-- I have never gotten around to trying it out though so I can't speak of my own experience
scubascratch@reddit
I have used one in the last month for 5.25” floppy recovery, works great. I stuck the drive in an old external CD enclosure that had a built in 12/5 power supply, just hung the ribbon cable out the back to the greaeweazle. Worked like a charm.
spektro123@reddit
No and yes. There aren’t any adapters that can talk to 5.25” drives. They all work with 3.5” drives. But you can use Greaseweazle to rip and write images together with virtual floppy drive or image browser.
BeenisHat@reddit
AFAIK 3.5 and 5.25 used the same 34 pin ribbon cable and interface. There is some signaling that happens with 3.5 drives which 5.25 drives never had, but 3.5" FD controllers are backwards compatible.
You might be able to ebay a 3.5 USB drive, take it apart and plug in your 5.25 drive.
As far as powering it...uh, good luck. Hopefully it works via USB.
Known_Confusion9879@reddit
If you bought a 5.25" drive is it for fitting internally to a PC or in a case? What are the connections on the drive?
3.5" and 5.25" are different connectors and then HD and standard format, single and double sized. CP/M 80 and all the other computers used different formatting. Even if you had an interface it still might not be readable on your computer.
Js987@reddit
Negative, and they’ve unfortunately never been a thing. USB didn’t come out until 5.25 floppies were already pretty uncommon, and during the brief overlap where you *might* have seen them together everybody had a floppy drive controller still (I had system with on-board USB and a 5.25 for copying old files in 1997). Plus, there’s technical issues, 5.25 drives need a 12V rail that USB doesn’t so you’d either need external power or an adapter increasing the cost on an already niche product.
Your easiest option today is still to just find an old computer that supports the format that can still communicate with a modern PC as a bridge, as the GreaseWeasel and KryoFlux are a bit more involved.
The_Folding_Atty@reddit
You could probably figure out a way to make it work, but then, problems remain. The IBM-PC shipped with a DSDD floppy drive (or two) with a capacity of (IIRC) 360KB and 127 (I think--it may have been 63) files. The latter is important, because if you wrote just one too many files to the disk, you overwrote the file allocation table (FAT) making all files inaccessible. I do not recall whether this was fixed in a later version of DOS, but NTFS lacks that limitation. I saw this happen with a colleague who wrote short letters
If you are planning to write code to run on an old PC/compatible, your problems pretty much end there. However, back in the wild west microcomputer days, disk formats were not OS-specific; they were manufacturer-specific. Which is to say that while Morrow and Kaypro and Osborne computers all ran CP/M 2.2 and used 5.25" drives, you could not take a disk from one and use it any of the others (and there were about 30-40 common 5.25" formats). Apple used its own format, of course. Hmm. I seem to remember that IBM AT-class (286) machines may also have used a "high-density" 5.25" format, but I'm not sure. It's been a while.
There were programs that ran on certain popular CP/M hardware (e.g., Kaypro) that allowed you to read/write other formats, including the MS-DOS format; I believe some programs were also available to run on MS-DOS systems as well, but I do not know that for a fact. The Apple 5.25" format could not, IIRC, be read on any other machine.
I remember all of this because when I moved from CP/M to DOS in the early '90s, I used software to transfer all of my data to MS-DOS compatible disks. I still have text files from the '80s floating around in a folder somewhere!
So--yes, it's possible. But it depends very much on what you want to do...
majestic_ubertrout@reddit
You can use a greaseweazle to operate one. To access one in the normal way I think the last boards to support them were X58 (which is actually somewhat still usable in 2026 but you're missing some instruction sets). I think people have tried a USB controller in the past but I could be wrong.
JasonPacker611@reddit
Yup, the greaseweazle is the best bet for that. I have been looking for some other alternatives for ages now.
penkster@reddit
The GoTek floppy emulators are the defacto standard for emulating a floppy drive on any computer. I'm currently running one inside a Unix machine from 1984, and it just uses a SANdisk USB stick for all the disk images.
https://www.gotekemulator.com/
There's even opensource firmware for it that extends the capabilities
https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
chickensalad21@reddit
A Greaseweazle or KryoFlux is the closest you'll find. There are several technical reasons that an all-purpose USB 5.25" floppy drive isn't feasible, including the need to 12V power and the fact that there were far more combinations of bit density, sectoring, rotation speed, etc. in this format than with 3.5" disks (and even 3.5" disks can't all be read by any one drive due to format differences).
The Greaseweazle and KryoFlux are magnetic flux readers. Using one is more involved than simply mounting the disk and dragging files to it, or using COPY or cp to push files. But they support just about any drive as long as it has an external power supply for the 5V and 12V rails.
fondow@reddit
Very well made publication about many options: https://mattfife.com/?p=3793
My favorite one is GreaseWeasle
Skycbs@reddit
I wonder about 8”? 😱
o462@reddit
Well... https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy
DigitalLife2@reddit
I used a 3½ USB floppy drive & just connected a 5¼ to it to get some old files i needed to transfer. I did this about 8 years ago. The 3½ was a cheap drive in got off of ebay
nixiebunny@reddit
I seem to recall that the 34 pin signal interface is the same between 5” and 3.5” floppy drives, by the 5” uses more DC power. There are USB to 3.5” floppy adapters widely available. The standard PC 4 pin Molex style power plug as used for DVD IDE drives is identical to 5” floppy power. You need a 34 pin edge connector floppy signal cable. No guarantees.
vintagecomputernerd@reddit
The kryoflux for sure, but it's a bit pricey (150€ for.board/PSU)
Not sure if cracking open a 3.5" usb floppy drive and using the board on a 5.25" would work...
derekcz@reddit
I think you could adapt the USB FDD translators, but they suck so bad it's unreal, your best bet to get it working without being extremely pissed off every step of the way is to get a PC with a native FDD super IO. I got a Z77 board from 2012 with an i7 and the system can even run Win 11 fine so all the modern coding tools should work.