You should be able to get them all with just 2 rigs I think, 1 with all 5.25 drives and the other with the 3.5 drives. The rest can be USB, parallel or even SCSI (ZIP SCSI would be the easiest of those to find I guess).
The first rig looks like this so far:
3.5" 1.44m, 1.2m, 720k (interal on floppy line)
5.25" 360k (read only), 720k, 1.2m (interal on flopy line)
Zip 750 100m (read only) 250m (ready only) 750m (internal on IDE line)
The Zip 750 emits some strange sounds when trying to read disks now and comes up with a drive error so I have a replacement comming. No clicks come from it so I'm pretty sure it's not the click o death, so I'll look into fixing the drive and maybe putting it in one of my high(ish) end comptuters.
The only 2 other drives I might try to fit into this thing are the 3.5" 2.88m and the LS-240. All others would either need hardware emulation, or as Tetrium pointed out, a different rig.
Never knew internal 700MB ZIP drives existed! I only ever saw an external USB one (which I promptly bought 😁).
wrote:Never knew internal 700MB ZIP drives existed! I only ever saw an external USB one (which I promptly bought 😁).
Get a 2gb Jaz drive.
wrote:Never knew internal 700MB ZIP drives existed! I only ever saw an external USB one (which I promptly bought 😁).
It's kinda funny, where I'm from, it's pretty easy to find a 750 internal vs finding an external at a decent price (internal costs ~€ 16 vs ~€ 26 or in dollars; $23 vs $37).
Get a 2gb Jaz drive.
I almost got one for my machine before I remembered that those are fully optical drives... But I guess there really isn't a reason why I shouldn't try to get a decent one anyway I guess.
wrote:wrote:Never knew internal 700MB ZIP drives existed! I only ever saw an external USB one (which I promptly bought 😁).
Get a 2gb Jaz drive.
The whole point of getting the 750MB ZIP drive was to be able to read the earlier ZIP disks and the 750meg ones with only a single drive.
Can the Jaz drive read all of the ZIP disks? Not afaik.
I never seen that many jaz drives, but theres also Caleb 144 and the HiFD something from Sony?
And lets not forget the 21MB floptical drive made by Insite
I never seen that many jaz drives, but theres also Caleb 144 and the HiFD something from Sony?
And lets not forget the 21MB floptical drive made by Insite
Believe me, I have looked high and low for those drives for some time now and never found them at any reasonable price 🤣 . So at this point I'm going to log them as "wishlist items" and leaving them out for now.
Thank you for the suggestions and information so far. 😀
wrote:I've decided that I'm going to try to include: 3.5" floppy (720k, 1.2m, 1.44m)* 3.5" floppy (1.44m, 2.88m) (if I can find one at […]
I've decided that I'm going to try to include:
3.5" floppy (720k, 1.2m, 1.44m)*
3.5" floppy (1.44m, 2.88m) (if I can find one at a decent price)
750mb zip ide*
LS-240 (720k, 1.44m, 2m, 120m, 240m) (if I can get ahold of one at a decent price)
5.25" floppy (360k, 720k, 1.2m)*
Any ideas on how to condense this further or any other suggested drives? I've left out a few formats intentionally so far because they either weren't IBM compatible or they were very unsuccessful on the market.
* Drives I have ready to setup and tested.
I suppose this is a bump?
Anyway, what have you got so far? 😉
Oops, I ment to update that I got my 750MB IDE ZIP working... accidently quoted myself. 🤣
I've had my brother testing some of his software on a few drives too and so far we've gotten 1.8MB stable on a standard 1.44MB floppy. Just a note of interest to throw in there.
I remember once having tried an overformatting util that could format a standard 1.44MB HD disk to 1.76MB I think.
It involved formatting the outer tracks with more sectors then the inner tracks, something along those lines.
I used the same util to format a 2.88MB ED disk to slightly over 3MB's
It was supposedly an unstable format and iirc you had to install the util on any computer you intended to read those specially formatted disks with.
Back when I was still using floppies as a main way to transport (small) files from the internet computer to another computer, I used the DMF formats as those could be read by any Microsoft OS by default.
At first I used fdread? Later I used WinImage as it was easier to use.
A shame fdread (or was it fdwrite??) wouldn't work with the 2.88 disks though.
I remember once having tried an overformatting util that could format a standard 1.44MB HD disk to 1.76MB I think.
It involved formatting the outer tracks with more sectors then the inner tracks, something along those lines.
That is pretty much the same technique that my brother is using to increase disk space, although he managed to hit ~2MB on 1.44MB disk before it became unstable.
I might as well get a few programs on the floppy machines as well to test what the drives really are capable of. For example, we ("we" being my brothers, a friend and I, though I really can't take any real credit for it) fit several MBs of data on a 1.44MB disk. Actually, we fit an entire CD video (yeah, remember those back in the day?) on the disk through compression and drive access utilities that they wrote or borrowed from friends... but it took a couple days to uncompress so it was watchable. 🤣 Wish I knew what happened to all those files.
I wouldn't trust the data on such overformatted floppy disks too much though, they may become unreadable sooner then usual. Still a nice solution of all you need them for is file transfer (even though I think there are better alternatives, like using compact flash IDE to transfer files quickly and en masse).
I think I once had an old version of Microsoft Office(it would run on windows 3.1 so that was before 1995) and the disks were formatted at 1.75MB.
wrote:I think I once had an old version of Microsoft Office(it would run on windows 3.1 so that was before 1995) and the disks were formatted at 1.75MB.
That's probably Microsoft's DMF format (1.68MB), which was originally created to fit more space on a disk as well as being an extra hurdle to prevent illegal copying of it's disks.
WinImage can format standard floppy disks into DMF disks but fdformat was very much fun to try different formats with as you can specify exactly how you want to format your disks, including if you wanted to use sector sliding (slightly improves read/write speed of a standard floppy disk), the number of sectors per track, the number of root directory entries etc.
I even formatted a 3.5in SS DD disk with fdformat by having it only format a single side instead of both sides, resulting in a 360KB diskette 😁
Btw, not all of those "custom" formats would be readable by Windows without using that TSR thingy (been a while since I played around with fdformat so can't remember every detail).
If you decide to use the DMF format, I can advicxe you to first do a full "standard" format first and discard any disks from your stack of DMF candidates if they have any bad sectors.
wrote:I wouldn't trust the data on such overformatted floppy disks too much though, they may become unreadable sooner then usual. Still a nice solution of all you need them for is file transfer (even though I think there are better alternatives, like using compact flash IDE to transfer files quickly and en masse).
Yeah, I don't put sensitive or valuable data on those disks (or on compressed disks for that matter). I only mess with compression for kicks, but some people I know take it very seriously. With the size/price of disks today, there really isn't a need for compression IMHO.
Btw, I once used that compression tool that supposedly made the disks "larger" and it would show something like 3MB's on a 1.44MB disk, but every time I added something the "size" of the disk decreased faster...weird marketing 🤣.
Anyway, I prefer ZIP for compressing (.zip compressed archive, not the ZIP disk 🤣).
I did find 1.68MB was quite handy as I often had files that were ever so slightly too big to fit on a standard formatted 1.44 disk.
I kinda stopped using floppy disks when I got my second hand parallel ZIP drive (250MB ZIP drive with 100MB ZIP disks), much more convenient and a LOT cheaper then USB flash drives at the time (128MB USB drives were like €35 each and I got a bunch of 100MB second hand ZIP disks for like €1 each at the time).
I still use floppies for transferring files real quick to systems without USB
wrote:It's kinda funny, where I'm from, it's pretty easy to find a 750 internal vs finding an external at a decent price (internal cos […]
wrote:Never knew internal 700MB ZIP drives existed! I only ever saw an external USB one (which I promptly bought 😁).
It's kinda funny, where I'm from, it's pretty easy to find a 750 internal vs finding an external at a decent price (internal costs ~€ 16 vs ~€ 26 or in dollars; $23 vs $37).
Get a 2gb Jaz drive.
I almost got one for my machine before I remembered that those are fully optical drives... But I guess there really isn't a reason why I shouldn't try to get a decent one anyway I guess.
Jaz drives aren't optical, they're rigid platter drives. You'll need either internal or external SCSI for one though 😀.
And don't forget the syquest SkyJet drives.
I keep wishing a manufacturer would release a next generation removable disk drive with say 100-500GB storage capacity, but the benefits of a magnetic platter vs a BD disc. It's not feasible though, and it's cheaper to have SATA drives in sleds and just hot swap them.
but every time I added something the "size" of the disk decreased faster...weird marketing
As you said they're using compression techniques and for freespace estimation they simply "guess"
that they can compress everything down to 50% size (which is a quite optimistic guess).
wrote:but every time I added something the "size" of the disk decreased faster...weird marketing
As you said they're using compression techniques and for freespace estimation they simply "guess"
that they can compress everything down to 50% size (which is a quite optimistic guess).
I'll stick to .zip or.rar as I rather not want to depend on an "archiver" that I only have 1 use for.
.zip and .rar are simply much easier for me. If stuff on my floppy disk are archived, they will be inside an archive and this will be obvious if I read a disk I put an archive on 5 years ago and had forgotten about.
But DMF I found quite usable for floppies. You format it one extra time (after having done a normal (full!!) format to check the disk for any bad sectors) and you got extra space right there without the extra data being compressed. Handy for files that are in between 1.44 and 1.68 megs in size.
LS-120 took forever to format, but this thread and me coming across my stash of Superdisk stuff kinda resparked my interest in them. And I think the LS-120 disks also look way 'cooler' then the bulky ZIP disks or the more square-ish looking standard floppies.
Too bad I don't have any external LS-120 drives though, the external ZIP 250 USB drive is very neat looking 😁
Also I think 250MB is still a respectable amount of data, especially for a retro rig.
I can't remember if I ever tried USB ZIP drives in Vista/7 though...
