I have two IBM usb drives I use sometimes for copying drivers and such when usb sticks is not an option or I'm feeling nostalgic for that floppy sound. Reliability seems good to me but floppies are floppies if you know what I mean. I have not tried to write 720kb disks but I could try.

I'm no expert but I would not buy the modern variants. I doubt these old usb had a lot of milage anyway. I think I bought mine for 5-15$ and they are like new.

Curious, what system do you have that only has a 720 kb drive? Ibm ps1 comes to mind.

I don't have any 720-only systems but I do have many old 720 floppies as well as 1.44.

Back a year or so ago same question came up and had a lot of good answers: USB Floppy
Reading/writing a 720k is easier than formatting one on a good USB floppy and there are other factors involved such as OS support
I use a Win7 machine for reading old 720k disks off the USB floppy drives that support 720k, the Win10 box has some issues with them for some reason.....but is probably just it's hardware.

i have an usb floppy drive, i bough it like 10 years ago, never used too much untill now, im using it to make bootable disk and sometimes transfer files in my main pc for my retro pc, it works good.
Is 3rd brand "freecon" (never seen this brand in my life), anyway is good, is really better than the crap one i have installed in the retro pc, less noise (a lot less).
The only objection is it came with 3-4 floppy disks included and they did not work.

Im using the tool rawwritewin-0.7 and its like Mission impossible autoself dectruction, because everytime i make a bootable disk, the next time it didnt work. I have to delete the program and extract it again to have a fresh one. No idea if its related to the OS version, is not prepared for windows 11. I dont think is a problem related to the drive.

I have an IBM USB floppy drive, which seems to have read/write issues when the disk is near capacity. It's like it's safe to fill it to 1.2MB, but beware from there.

I started using a clunkier but way more reliable method. mTCP running FTPSRV on my 386, Filezilla on the modern rig, and do it all over the network. Biggest external floppy drive ever! But I can also do 5.25's that way 😁

Ouch. I hate it when people describe FTP as clunky:

• FTP is cross platform; it works on anything from personal computers to mainframes.
• FTP is routable beyond your home network. You can connect to servers all across the world.
• The FTP server you are using in particular supports multiple concurrent connections, a flexible user permission model, and squeezes a lot of performance out of the machine.

Let's be thankful that elephants can be taught to dance. ;-0

mbbrutman wrote on 2022-08-15, 02:33:

Ouch. I hate it when people describe FTP as clunky: […]
Show full quote

Ouch. I hate it when people describe FTP as clunky:

• FTP is cross platform; it works on anything from personal computers to mainframes.
• FTP is routable beyond your home network. You can connect to servers all across the world.
• The FTP server you are using in particular supports multiple concurrent connections, a flexible user permission model, and squeezes a lot of performance out of the machine.

Let's be thankful that elephants can be taught to dance. ;-0

Ha, didn't mean it that way! I meant that using an entire, running 386 as an external floppy drive was clunky compared to a USB drive.

The software part of the equation is beautiful magic - and bulletproof in my experience doing this. Love your work 😉

Forgive me for hijacking this thread but I'm also looking for a way to get floppy drives to work with USB. I'm really only worried about 1.44 floppies to use with DOS and Win9x systems. I really want to get an internal floppy drive to work over USB with a Win10/XP dual boot sleeper PC that doesn't have a 34pin floppy header. I bought one of them 34pin to USB floppy adapters on Amazon and while that shows up when plugged in as A drive and reports as a floppy drive. It won't read any known good disks with a known good drive, you hear the drive being accessed but it just says the disk is unreadable after 20 or so seconds but when the drive and disk are used with my 98 computer with native floppy support the read and write fine. The adapter seem to work for other people going by reviews so I either got a bad unit or the handful of drives I have lying around don't work with the adapter. Before I try another one from Amazon I see OP talking about GreaseWeazle, looking into that it seems way more advanced then what I'm looking for but I can't seem to tell if it has a mode to work the same way the cheapo floppy to USB adapters work, as in just reports the drive to Windows and lets me open the disks via file explore, does it work that way or does it need some sort of specialty application to access the disks? If GreaseWeazle can't work that way is their any other options I should look into outside the cheap no name brand adapters on Amazon?

Thanks!

Horun wrote on 2022-08-14, 23:24:

Back a year or so ago same question came up and had a lot of good answers: USB Floppy
Reading/writing a 720k is easier than formatting one on a good USB floppy and there are other factors involved such as OS support
I use a Win7 machine for reading old 720k disks off the USB floppy drives that support 720k, the Win10 box has some issues with them for some reason.....but is probably just it's hardware.

Yeah, that's one of the threads I based my post on, as well as several Reddit threads as well on retro/vintage computing. I wasn't able to figure out a definitive answer from what I tried to research as people seemed to just either only suggest one of the three solutions I mentioned or toss out random models of drives they used. There wasn't much debate or discussion on any specific method or models. I was hoping to try to get a bit more definitive information than just trying random models and methods.

Pierre32 wrote on 2022-08-15, 02:44:

Ha, didn't mean it that way! I meant that using an entire, running 386 as an external floppy drive was clunky compared to a USB drive.

The software part of the equation is beautiful magic - and bulletproof in my experience doing this. Love your work 😉

Oh, I'll give you that, but that is the "Tweener" or "Mothership" machine problem, isn't it?

I have to keep the following "network floppy drives" around:

• 386-40: 360KB 5.25 floppy, 1.44MB 3.5 floppy, and sometimes a parallel port Zip drive
• Pentium 233: 1.44MB floppy, IDE Zip, TR-4 tape drive
• PC XT: 360KB 5.25 floppy, Bernoulli Box 10 and 20MB drives
• Pentium 133: 1.44MB, floppy, 1.2MB floppy

(All of these machines have other similar uses too, like IDE controllers or SCSI controllers ...)