I consider normal 3.5" drives way too common to deserve any special attention. This way of manufacturing became the standard in the late years of floppy drives, but at the same time the mechanisms were more modern, lighter and minimal. Yes you can feel the general quality degradation as the floppy was becoming obsolete, but I never really faced any serious problems with them.

The big plus of later floppy drives is that they almost exclusively went to direct drive motors == no more belts to replace!

megatron-uk wrote on 2023-01-09, 13:36:

The big plus of later floppy drives is that they almost exclusively went to direct drive motors == no more belts to replace!

You have to go back a ways to see belt driven drives though. From my time perspective anyway. The only belt driven floppy drive I ever owned were Apple Disk II drives, but all the PC drives I've ever owned were direct drive. And almost all of them were of the cast frame type.

Maybe the original PC full height drives were belt driven, but I started using computers in the 286/386 era.

Agree with Konc - while nice, the reason older drives are usually* better are different, like being made with at least nominally some care, or the Sony MP-F17W-87 having an actual switch for the drive number 😀

* Actually the made-in-2007 drive on my Optiplex 755, blatantly there just so that people could install XP in AHCI mode (the BIOS only supports one 1440k disk and actually lists USB to traditional floppy emulation first), has held much better than the 2000 original Panasonic drive of the HP Vectra VL400, which made me throw away over 8 disks not having anything else on which to test them...

konc wrote on 2023-01-09, 13:22:

I consider normal 3.5" drives way too common to deserve any special attention. This way of manufacturing became the standard in the late years of floppy drives, but at the same time the mechanisms were more modern, lighter and minimal. Yes you can feel the general quality degradation as the floppy was becoming obsolete, but I never really faced any serious problems with them.

I agree in a way, I think 5.25 drives are more interesting. Even the front plate of 3.5 drive all have nearly the same appearance. But in my mind, a retro computer has to have a both that and 3.5 drive, and before buying one I've been looking if it's a cast frame.

At least most of the 3.5" drives have a dust flap, and are unlikely to have air sucked through them.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2023-01-09, 14:45:

At least most of the 3.5" drives have a dust flap, and are unlikely to have air sucked through them.

They still get plenty of dust in them! I wish computer fans would blow into the case, and could pull outside air through a filter. No dust then.

I mostly pick a FDD by looks be it colour of the drive or activity LED.
With everything networked the drives get so little use (typically only during a fresh install) the drive's quality is much less important