You can get much better USB floppy drives that are 2x speed (or more) from Dell and Sony. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWwp3vVtElw

kingcake wrote on 2024-01-31, 06:10:

You can get much better USB floppy drives that are 2x speed (or more) from Dell and Sony. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWwp3vVtElw

I completely forgot those 2x drives existed, thanks for the reminder!

Much better option over the no-name imports I think. Still affordable as well it seems.

Nothing bad to say about Alps drives in my experience, just the same as Sony and Panasonic.

Alps is a solid brand

Consider mitsumi and samsung

Late Samsungs (post-2004 or so), esp. their SFD-321B model, can be pretty poorly made. These were meant to be cheap above all. It's not a huge issue if the drive works, but it might have:
* Badly balanced spindle motor - the spindle itself will turn properly, the issue is with the motor flywheel. It can cause vibrations and possibly affect reads/writes depending on how the drive is mounted.
* No support for 720k floppies - the sensor is just not installed. Can be "repaired" but why bother, just get a complete drive in the first place.
* All the metal sheets that make up the drive external covers are flimsy, the PCB one might even be missing - shouldn't really affect perfomance but it will gather more dust inside.

I like Alps, NECs and TEACs. I do care about writing to floppies and also about 3mode support. I can clean pretty much any floppy drive so used drives are OK with me if they work. In fact a very dirty drive that has seen next to no use could be (after proper cleaning) a better find than a NOS model from late 2000.

For USB try to find something based on TEAC FD-05PUB, it's not any 2x or faster drive but it's a good, reliable model that supports 3mode. In fact you should look at any USB drives that are IBM or HP branded (for their laptops), these have good build quality and are more often then not a TEAC OEM. Look for stickers on the bottom of the unit. Any old drive (used or not) can have issues with the mechanical sensor switches but I found that the cheap chinese no-name USB drives tend to be more affected than others.

For what it's worth, the same vendor selling the N.O.S. Alps drives on Amazon also has them listed on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335197784517

One thing to watch out for with USB floppy drives is that not all of them support 720 KiB disks. My TEAC FD-05PUW does, purchased from Dell some 15+ years ago.