Suggestions on getting old floppy drives running without vintage machine
Posted by dnabre@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 22 comments
I've got some 5¼" inch drives floating around. Don't know if they are functional, over even what kind they are (360K? 1.2MB?). My vintage stuff isn't really PC (HPPA, SGI, Mac) or laptops with limited connectivity. Any suggestions how to hook up these drives? I can do SCSI, probably PCI, whatever connectivity I can sort out on G3 eMacs or G4/Intel Mac minis.
I don't have anything with ISA slots or a built in floppy controllers anymore. It used to be I could pick up an old PC from a thrift store (I'm in US) that would probably get me most of the way there. At some point, shops just stopping have old machines or even much computer stuff around at all. Goodwill seems to have moved a lot of their computer stuff to online auctions. Despite the inconvenience and cost, I'm open to suggestions on cheap ways of getting an old PC as a solution.
I've heard of USB interface cards designed to support a wide variety of floppy drives, but for the life of me, my searching can't find them (I'm sure I'll recognize the name once someone mentions it), but I'm curious what other options are out there.
Looking both in terms of a minimally working setup that will let me test the drives, pull data off only floppies (not something I have a need for at the moment), and for a long term reasonably polished
dlarge6510@reddit
I have two TEAC 5.25" floppies that have a SCSI adapter that was supplied with them back in the day. Maybe you'll find a couple on eBay or something. They literally plug in to the back of them. Never tried them over SCSI anymore.
Basically if you want to use these you'll have to find a card to add floppies back to those Macs (I thought Apple were insane when they dropped floppies just to be cool and different) or have a PC or anything else that supports them to use them.
I use my old AMD Duron machine that I have set up as my general testing machine, letting me test IDE, floppy etc using a motherboard that's old enough to not have SATA (I added some PCI cards) but still have IDE and floppy channels. I have better, such as my much newer AMD Athlon 64 X3 three core machine with an AM2+ motherboard I was using before my current Ryzen was built. I think that was a gigabyte board, but has floppy, DDR2 or 3 can't remember, many SATA and even a forerunner to USB 3 before they standardised the connector colours. So you don't need ISA or an old board as my AM2+ is only a couple of generations behind the AM4 I'm using as my main machine.
You could also do the following:
Convert them to USB floppies. This depends on the usb-floppy bridge chip in the USB floppy drive you open up but if that chip supports a 5.25" drive and the capacity then it's merely a matter of converting the cables and connectors. Someone recently did just that on YouTube. You still need OS support and well, I don't know anything about Apple but considering they were anti-user and anti system building/tinkering and anti floppy simply because it was the crazy thing to do I don't have much hope you're going to get one working on a Mac.
Get a small form factor PC. A little machine that has any floppy drive. I have a little Compaq 486, it's designed for use as a till or office work. Has barely any room inside but you only want that floppy controller, oh and a cable with a connector for a 5.25" drive.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
That's all ideas and suggestions.
If you could give me any more info on that adapter, I'd be grateful. I love me some old school SCSI. My trio of SGI Indys shipped with SCSI 3.5" floppies. If I could find those adapters, they would probably a cost a bunch, but I'd be curious to check them out.
Trying to find a motherboard like your Duron machine was just at the tail end of floppy/ide controllers might the best solution for a long time setup.
I've looked into the USB-floppy adapters after some great suggestions on here. The common basic usb 3.5" floppy drives you can get all over the place use laptop floppy drives through a chip which basically only handles that type of floppy drive.
The Greazewealze (I'd heard of this project before, but couldn't track it down until someone on this post gave me the name) and similar projects are basically making a version of that usb-floppy interface that can be configured to work which a huge range of floppy drives. Looking into those projects, it looks that pretty minimal electronics work to get a RP2040, or even a beefy Arduino, to make that interface. Which is definitely looking like the best (cost+effort) path to getting basic functionality it. Your suggestions are looking like the best optoins for a longterm setup.
Thanks again for all the ideas
dlarge6510@reddit
It came with the drive. I'll look up the model if there is one but it's a TEAC FD-55 drive.
Sorry, looking like I have two pretty rareish examples of a TEAC FD-55GS!
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Teac_FD-55_series
They are both TEAC FD-55GFR drives only with a SCSI adapter attachment. This bolts onto the drive itself so essentially comes as part of the drive. It has a standard 50pin SCSI connection, a cable that plugs into the drive connector and a molex cable to power itself plus the drive. Also jumpers, presumably to set SCSI id etc.
Sounds like Vogons might be interested in me sending photos etc.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the info.
Pretty cool drives. Get Vogon some photos, they seem pretty rare.
There are still a lot of SCSI in production (industrial control wise), so unusually SCSI stuff sells for a LOT. I got $350 for my old USB<-> SCSI1 cable from Iomega Jaz drive the other year.
dlarge6510@reddit
SCSI never went anywhere. The connectors changed and it went from a parallel one to serial.
It's used to connect most storage today. SATA is a little brother to SAS, Serial Attached SCSI with SAS controllers directly able to use SATA abd SAS drives together only with the SATA ones lacking some of the more advanced SAS capabilities.
SCSI is also sent over networks with iSCSI, letting anything up to Windows 11 attach network storage as if its a scsi drive, it works across the internet as well.
Then you have USB which incorporates the sort after UAS protocol, USB Attached SCSI. UAS replaced the old BOT (Bulk Only Transfer) protocol for connecting to USB storage. BOT is incredibly inefficient and slow, especially for faster flash storage. It's considered particularly important to make sure you get a UAS capable HDD caddy etc these days, this brings full SCSI capabilities over USB letting all the good stuff of SATA etc such as the full command set, SMART, Native Command Queueing etc to be used.
SCSI is everywhere and the only thing that competes with it today is the relatively new NVMe protocol used by PCIe flash storage.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
I know, but I still love the old school parallel SCSI stuff.
Even have a P-SCSI/QC bridge somewhere that I haven't gotten around to playing with. Two P-SCSI channels, made available over FC. Not that I don't have P-SCSI PCI-e card or two.
Kaldor-Silverwand@reddit
Macs do not use 5.25” floppy diskettes. If they are HD then they would have been used with an IBM PC. If they are DD then they could also have been used with an Apple II.
Key_Sign_5572@reddit
Unless I’m uninformed regarding some new project, your Macs will never read them. It’s a filesystem issue more than anything else.
Try to find an old pentium that might support a 5.25 inch drive and a shitty network card at the same time
docshipley@reddit
All of my 68k Macs happily read floppies written on a PC. The filesystem is no problem at all.
There's no cheap and easy way to connect a 5.25" drive and use that, but it's a hardware issue.
Key_Sign_5572@reddit
You must have some third party software running for that. It does not work out of the box - there’s the whole resource fork issue.
docshipley@reddit
Google "Apple File Exchange"
In OS 7.5 (iirc) that program - which came with the OS - became an extension, so you didn't have to start a separate program to access the PC disks.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
None of my Macs are even old enough to have floppy drives or controllers. Filesystem issue isn't a problem though. If I can do raw read/writes to the drive, I can handle the rest software-wise.
Xfgjwpkqmx@reddit
Get a Greaseweazel to interface with the drives and use that to backup any floppies that need backing up.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
Greaseweazel! thank you, that was the USB interface I was trying to find but could get any hits on it, and couldn't remember the name.
tyttuutface@reddit
It doesn't make it easy to access the data on the disks, it only reads raw magnetic flux data.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
There is software for Greaseweazel to interrupt the flux data and generate a raw disk image. Which is actually better for a lot of thing, and one can always just use a block device loopback mount on it.
BeenisHat@reddit
You can still buy 3.5" USB floppy drives. Perhaps you'd be able to get one, take it apart and use the interface portion of it to hook up the 5.25 drive.
dnabre@reddit (OP)
USB 3.5" floppy drives are repurposed laptop floppies that use an interface that specialized to those type of 3.5" drives.
ultrahkr@reddit
It's not exactly that easy because old floppy drives require a lot of juice and powah to spin and move the heads around...
Kiwi_eng@reddit
If they’re 5.25” and look clean they most likely work.
thatguychad@reddit
Well, since you're here....can we interest you in an early Pentium PC? 🤔
dnabre@reddit (OP)
I've got that niche of my collection covered by a NEC Versa 4200 (laptop), with a 133MHz Pentium (even has the FDIV bug).
I've been trying to declutter, and my vintage stuff is both the hardest to let go of and items which get the least use. Ideally I'd rather not add a full system that I otherwise wouldn't want.