My mainboard has a floppy connector, and I have a 1.44MB floppy drive connected to it:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page … spx?pid=3786#ov

Although it only supports a single floppy drive.

Leolo wrote:

Although it only supports a single floppy drive.

Usually a single floppy controller supports 2 or 4 floppy drives (using the 1-to-2 or 1-to-4 floppy cable).

But dual floppy drives have lost their functionality once hard drives and more advanced OSs with higher system RAMs had taken over the need for 2 drives.

Malik wrote:

Leolo wrote:

Although it only supports a single floppy drive.

Usually a single floppy controller supports 2 or 4 floppy drives (using the 1-to-2 or 1-to-4 floppy cable).

But dual floppy drives have lost their functionality once hard drives and more advanced OSs with higher system RAMs had taken over the need for 2 drives.

True. Multiple floppies were at their most useful on systems with small amounts of RAM and no hard drive for copying files otherwise there was too much disk swapping. Once RAM sizes increased to the point where the contents of an entire floppy could be held in memory and hard drives became cheap enough that anyone could afford one, the second floppy drive kind of lost it's purpose.

Malik wrote:

Leolo wrote:

Although it only supports a single floppy drive.

Usually a single floppy controller supports 2 or 4 floppy drives (using the 1-to-2 or 1-to-4 floppy cable).

Man, and I can still kick myself for tossing that WEIRD floppy cable that kinda looked like a hydra and had 4 points for connecting a floppy drive. I thought it was somekind of proprietary ancient-pc-manufacturer thing.

Hi, although I may be a couple years late, I just found this little gem on eBay:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/1-44-MB-1-4MB-USB-FLOP … R-/291979703444?

Together with this little accessory

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00QVTVB84/ref … 4_t1_B000IV6S9S

You could bring your floppy drive back to life (well, until USB ports get outdated).
BUT I do not know whether or not this method works; I just bought an old-school case that came with a floppy drive, so I thought about making it work somehow (just for the fun of it).

Maybe someone around here will have a use for this.

Why archive on the same machine that's also the NAS/file server? I'd just dedicate the machine to have no head, but lots of disks, and do the actually archiving on computers with FDCs or whatever dinguses, and then shunt the files to the server.

Have to say I'd just use an older computer for it, but if you really must use something new the Catweasel is (in the UK) 90 quid or so. That's not that bad for a specialist piece of kit, and you'll be able to move it to a future motherboard. Of course for PCIe only boards you will need a bridge..

First off I would try cracking open a USB floppy drive, though!

Update on the floppy-to-USB adapter I found on eBay:

I ordered two of them (I salvaged another 3.5" floppy drive from an outdated computer at my school) and they both work. It took about two weeks for the delivery, but since this was sent from China to Europe, I can't really complain. The floppy drives are beeing recognised as such by my Windows 7 PC with no real issues. The cables look shoddy as hell (just as in the vendor's product images), so I would recommend using zipties to attach them to the power cables. The PCBs look okay for 19 Euros per unit; I've seen worse soldering jobs on more expensive hardware from China. The only real issue I encountered was when I inserted a floppy disc into one of the drives, found a pic of the cat i grew up with, tested the other drive and couldn't get the image back on any of them (the file got damaged somehow). This could be caused by one of my drives though, since I did a quick and dirty read and write test on a disk that had never been used before and had no problems whatsoever (as long as you don't count ejecting the drive and pushing it back in to make it work as a problem).

Again, not many people will need this information since there are way easier ways to accomplish this as others already suggested.
I personally wanted my sleeper rig to look old and outdated, but I also didn't want the drives to just sit in my case without any functionality.