USB Flppy reader that support 720 and 360 discs?

[BG101]

Do you know of a 5.25" USB drive?

Umm, no; lotsa folks'd like one though.

Me too.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

I'm tempted to have a go at building. Would it take much more than stripping the interface from a 3½" USB drive caddy, installing it in a 5¼" one and fitting a suitable connector and drive? Apart from modifying the drivers of course, to provide the appropriate drive parameters.

Or will a USB FDD interface simply not work with a 5¼" drive.




BG

 

[Chuck(G)]

Me too.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

I'm tempted to have a go at building. Would it take much more than stripping the interface from a 3½" USB drive caddy, installing it in a 5¼" one and fitting a suitable connector and drive? Apart from modifying the drivers of course, to provide the appropriate drive parameters.

Or will a USB FDD interface simply not work with a 5¼" drive.

Well, if you take a look at a 3.5" USB drive, you'll see that the USB controller and the FDC for the drive are rolled into a single chip. It might be possible to use the PCB from a 3.5" drive on a 5.25" frame, but I wouldn't want to try.

When USB floppies first made their appearance, the USB/FDC part simply interfaced into a legacy 34-pin floppy interface. But they were never very common and I haven't seen one of those in a very long time.

Probably better to use a dedicated μC and an FDC chip to provide the USB interface to any legacy drive. Something akin to the Microsolutions Backpack parallel-port floppy--just had a 82077, some DRAM and an 8051-family controller in the box. It was a good idea--you could have port-level access to the FDC via the parallel port.