First post, by Cyber Akuma
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- Newbie
I have been trying to figure out what to do in terms of being able to read/write my old floppy disks on newer systems as well as use said drive to image and create boot disks for my older systems.
I originally thought that I could just buy one of those hundreds of cheap USB Floppy drives on Amazon and be done with it, but now I am hearing that they are pretty poor in terms of what they support and most will pretty much only read standard 1.44 disks as if they were a USB drive and that's it.
Are there any of those that support both 1.44 and 720? Can I even use these to make an image from a floppy disk, or even write an image to a floppy disk, or are these purely designed for just reading data off your old 1.44 floppies and nothing else?
My second option that I saw was many people recommending some older models before all of these cheap clones exploded everywhere, but they haven't been made for years so I would have to rely on getting them used somewhere, and it's not clear if they also support any of this. I saw these models commonly mentioned:
DELL FDDM-101: This one seems like the cheapest and easiest option. I was confused at first why this was mentioned because it looks like it's just a slimline laptop drive. But apparently it has a mini-usb port on the side and you can use it as an (albeit a bit janky/ugly) external just by plugging it into USB? I saw an enclosure for some of them so I am not sure if that enclosure is required or not. And if you would need external power if you use the bare drive without an enclosure (assuming I didn't mis-understand that the bare drive has a USB port on it). I also heard some others say that their Dell drives could NOT read 720 floppies, although I also saw this model specifically mentioned as being able to. Anyone have any idea about this drive?
NEC UF0002: Another one I saw mentioned. Seems to be a bit pricier than others on eBay, but I can't find any other information about if it will work or not.
LS120: Saw these mentioned several times, and they will supposedly read 720 and 1.44 on top of superdisks. But it's hard to find a drive at all, much less external USB ones. And when I can, they seem like the most expensive option by far. Did the slimline ones for laptops by any chance also have a USB port on them like that Dell model I mentioned? Or do I have to get an external one?
HP DP353FUE: Another one I saw talked about... but I could not find any information on it, or even find it on eBay at all.
SmartDisk FDUSB-TM2: This one seems popular... too popular. I saw several on eBay in different colors, so I am worried if this was also popular to make cheap crappy clones out of at the time. On top of that, supposedly depending which drive was used as it's internals would matter if it works with 720 disks or not?
And my third nuclear option would be to just get this device I saw talked about called a GreaseWeazle that's supposed to read and write EVERYTHING.... supposedly. This would be the most expensive option by far since on top of getting the device that would cost me anywhere from $36-46 after shipping, I would need to still attach my own floppy drive to it, and I am not sure if I have any spare old floppy drives lying around anymore.
On top of that, it's not clear if you can really use this for standard IBM PC floppy disks. It's supposedly supposed to work through multiple formats, but every single video I tried to look up about it was shown using it to read/write Amiga disks. Is this thing only for Amiga? Or would it work for IBM PC formatted disks too?
It also presents me with the opposite issue I have with the USB drives I mentioned. I have no idea if this device will even let you browse a disk and read/write files as if they were a USB drive.... or if it ONLY lets you create images of the disks or write images to them, not mount the disk as a drive and use it in Windows.
So I am not sure which of any of these three options will work for me, the cheaper USB drives on Amazon, trying to hunt down specific models of older USB floppy drives, or using a GreaseWeazle. Can anyone help give me some advice on this?