Brands to avoid

[Skyhanger]

I just need a floppy drive for flashing bios or whatnot... Since floppy drives are pretty simple and cheap, I guess any brand is as good as any other. I just wanted to know if there are any brands I should avoid like the plague?

Also, is there a way to avoid using a floppy for flashing bios? (mobo, gpu, possibly dvd-rw)

 

[Corporate Thug]

assuming you have a flash drive and BIOS that lets u boot off of removable storage, you could make the flash drive a boot device and use that but it is too much trouble IMO

i wouldnt worry about brands too much. TEAC or Sony or Mitsumi would do fine

 

[Ricemarine]

I'd avoid mitsumi...

Pins broke too easily for me.

Everything else is fine.

 

[Zepper]

I consider the Mitsumi the bottom of the pile. I've seen lots of dead ones. I like YE Data, Panasonic (Matsushi_ta - guess the banned word!), Alps, Samsung and Sony. Teac has been living off past laurels for a loooong time but their floppy drives are still OK. Toshibas are very good too, but I think they stopped making them a long time ago so it's very hard to find a new one.
. YE Data makes a cool unit that combines floppy drive with flash card reader. It is also sold under the Adaptec brand. Provantage.com carries it under both names. Definitely NOT cheap...

.bh.

 

[CKent]

Seems like Sony floppy drives (like most of their products) are about twice the price of the competitor. I think mine's Teac, it's been good to me.

 

[Sunner]

I don't think I've ever seen a dead floppy, no matter the brand.

 

[Aznguy1872]

sony is pretty good and yet very cheap. They all seem the same to me and are all around the same price..

 

[Bozo Galora]

Sony's no baloney

 

[Zepper]

Most of the good brands can be found for $10. or less.

When I had the "interesting" job of assembling PCs at a computer store, we RMAd at least 1 out of 20 Mitsumi drives because they couldn't pass our checkout testing. So the end-users never got to see the REALLY bad ones.

I'm not sure what brand is in my current machine but I've had it for at least 5 years (and it was used when I got it) - it has been thru several iterations of about all the stuff around it. I think the only thing I have in my machine that's anywhere near the floppy's age is my Plextor 4220 SCSI CD burner. The last one I bought to put in a spec. machine was a Samsung - it passed my burn-in and deep function testing with flying colors.

.bh.

 

[asicman]

get the sony. cheaper than the teac.

 

[eplebnista]

avoid: mitsumi
recommend: samsung or teac

 

[lenjack]

Got me a Mitsumi floppy with an integrated card reader a month ago. So far, no problems.

 

[Ike0069]

I had one that came with a Dell PC that died, but I don't know the brand.
I bought an NEC OEM Floppy from Newegg for about $8.

 

[thomsbrain]

i've never seen a dead floppy drive, so i think you really can't go wrong with any of the name brands.

 

[mwmorph]

i got 3 teacs from way back still working. also 1 samsung from 6 years ago works fine.

my new pc does not have a floppy drive but a falsh card slot. i have a sd card. how do i make that a boot disk? my bios allows me to use the flash reader to boot from but when i go to format, the option to make the SD card bootable is breyed out.

my other opiton is a very old tac, but it seems it has 1 more pin than on my motherboard since the legacy ones had that pin cofig. you know what im talking about, theo ld ones had 2 rows of pins, the newer mb connecter has 2 rows of pins with 1 missing to tell you how to plug the cable in.

 

[Zepper]

The missing pin was unused anyway so they used it for a key to keep the dummies from plugging in backwards - but it still doesn't stop them all... :roll:

. You can open that missing hole with a hot (match, lighter, etc.), straightened paper clip. Or just clip the offending pin off of the drive.

.bh.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't have a floppy drive in my machine. The sound of those stupid slow things grinding away pisses me off. It's time for the floppy to die. Flash your bios with your cd, or dvd drive. Don't give manufacturers anymore reason to produce floppies :^).

 

[Waylay00]

Alps works fine for me.