Most modern motherboards don't have IDE ports anymore, so I was wondering:

If they can make external USB floppy drives and internal USB SD card readers, why can't I find an internal USB floppy drive? Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
I've even found a dual USB floppy/multi-card reader, but the floppy drive still requires a separate IDE cable! Maybe it's just lack of demand, but I don't think there is any technical limitation stopping them.

Completely useless question, as I got rid of all my 3½" floppies years ago, but it still bugs me. Solution will go to whoever gives me the most interesting answer. :P

On a side note, a lot of kids these days are growing up without even knowing what floppies(and even CDs!) are. ;_;
Although I had no idea until recently about cassette tapes storing computer data, so I guess it's fair.

I know there was external USB floppy drives a while back for laptops, same with CD-ROM drives...

But with floppies being so fragile and unreliable, I won't touch them. I've taken fresh floppies, written to one, then took it to my laptop only for it to be corrupted at sector 0...

Stuff just isn't made the way it used to be...

would this be the right place to rant about the imation 120 mb floppy and how its a shame it never got anywhere ? ;p

Pssshshssht.

Zip disks or nothing for me.

Either it was a problem with the price, or it was about the same time burnable CD's were becoming popular and it became redundant... I remember having this discussion and several links to related products like 6-8 months ago....

Most of those on Ebay look like they still have the 34-pin floppy connectors, except for the notebook ones which is weird. And I think IDE-SATA converters don't work for floppy drives since modern motherboards don't have floppy controllers.

However, that video is awesome! I'm quite tempted to try with the floppy drive from my older computer, but I don't really have any disks to test it with!

Although something to take note of. If you do start trying to access old floppies, and I'm meaning mostly to read content, you're probably better off raw copying the data to individual images, then transferring them to your other computer and mounting them either read-only, or through something like imdisk.

Unix command:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img

or for added compression: (Using it this way gets the compression during the slow copying stage rather than after)

dd if=/dev/fd0 | gzip -cf9 >floppy.img.gz

I never thought about making actual images, for most of the programs I wanted to keep I just copied the files to my hard drive. I'll keep that in mind.

Although the only chance of me messing with floppy disks again would be if I started collecting old games again.

Well working with images is a lot faster and simpler than you think, however it does take just a little know how. Plus empty space compresses really well. If you save your floppies as images, it may look a little like this screenshot. I remember doing a raw copy of all these files back some 10 years ago before putting them in for backups due to their old age.

God that's a long time ago...

^ This! Zip disks are so slick/smooth, I liked them a lot. Unlike USB thumb sticks, Zip disks are really easy to put into the drive without looking (or in the dark). I still have my external Zip drive (Parallel Port), and one internal one.

I don't understand what he did in the video.... didn't he just turn an internal drive into an external drive? What was the point?

Badly recorded with one hand.. i can't watch past 5 minutes, but i saw the important parts...

Since newer computers no longer use IDE, what he did was get a USB ready cable of the adapter that goes into a regular floppy drive, then you can plug that into a slot on the mother board. In reality you can make internal external and external internal, but with how things are manufactured anymore it's difficult to do some of the low level work without ruining the project entirely.

One thing to be wary of, is the power on the USB. USB's are suppose to give a constant 5 volts, however on laptops this isn't always the case. Some devices and externals also come with cables that have 2 plugs, one for data and one you can plug in for more power if you have a powered strip elsewhere. But that's going off topic.

Yeah, that video gives me motion sickness, but I'm still curious to try it. But I just realised the floppy part still wouldn't connect to the USB header on the motherboard, I would have to thread it out the back to plug into a regular USB port, and I'm not sure if the cord would be long enough for my full size tower...

I am a big fan of the floppy disc era and wish they had them still out with flash capacities like usb drives, COMPANIES GET ON THAT I KNOW FLASH CAN BE THIN! DO IT.