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Does anyone make an internal floppy w/ usb connector?

T

TStep

Platinum Member
I have been jerking around with an Asus P4S800 and all seems well with the board, but I cannot get the floppy working for the life of me. I know an external floppy would suffice, but that is just one additional part not bolted onto the case.

I have seen card reader/floppy combos with the 4 pin usb connection that is connected to the mobo, but they all still use the 34 pin connector. Has anyone ever come across an internal floppy that connects to the mobo via the usb?
 
I believe that I've seen combo 3.5in floppy drives and memory card/stick readers and a USB hub, in a combined unit, but I don't know if the floppy drive connects using USB or a standard 34-pin cable.
 
Every card reader / floppy combo that I've seen so far has for example:

1) the card reader portion of the combo connected via usb
and
2) the floppy portion of the combo connected via 34 pin and 4 pin floppy power cable.

Are there any pci add on cards that will supply the 34 pin connector?
 
Probably have to get a multi-I/O card and disable all the other stuff. I haven't seen a stand-alone floppy controller card in ages. Did some searching and could find nothing. All multi-I/O w/ floppy controller were for ISA slot... I guess unless you want to replace or RMA the mobo, a USB floppy is the way to go. compgeeks.com had some cheap.
.bh.

:moon:
 
You can't do a legacy floppy disk controller on a PCI card - you'd need access to ISA DMA and IRQ signalling, which is not available in a PCI slot. That's why there are none available, unlike on ISA cards.

USB indeed is the resort - or an (ATAPI) SuperFloppy drive which connects to IDE.
 
By super floppy, do you mean the LS120? I had forgotten about that. That seems like a great idea and exactly what I'm looking for, thanks.
 
Some place had some laptop LS-120 drives for sale for $8.00, I'm not sure where... I'll see if I can find 'em.
. And remember, the LS-120 was one of the slowest IDE devices ever made, so it is best to isolate it on its own IDE channel. This laptop LS-120 has a 5V motor, so it will be even slower than a normal one.
.bh.

Where's the :sun: ?
 
Yes, they're usually PIO mode 3 devices. Not to mix with DMA capable devices on the same channel. And they need to be on a legacy IDE channel not a "native PCI" one. In other words, you need to put them on one of the mainboard chipset's own IDE channels.
 
Actually the SiliconImage based PCI IDE/RAID adapter cards (e.g. the Syba from dealsonic or newegg) will work with the LS-120. And if you decide you want to try one of the actual SuperDisk media, remember the tracks are laser-located so clean laser lenses are critical to its operation. The LS-120 locates regular floppy tracks servo-mechanically just like a regular drive.
. And even though slow for an IDE device, it will still blow away any regular floppy drive in reading/writing regular floppy disks. It is wise to avoid writing to a floppy disk that has already been written to by a normal floppy drive. Only write to new disks. The reason is that the write head's track is much narrower than a standard floppy drive's so you can get bleed from the old data surrounding the LS-120 track.
. For best floppy writing results, I recommend copying the data off of a floppy, bulk erase it, reformat with the LS drive, and then write the data back to the floppy.
. FYI: There is a newer LS drive from Matsushita (Panasonic) that can store 240MB on a superdisk and 20MB on a normal floppy disk, but they are very hard to find...
.bh.
 
May not want to jump in too quickly. I was told by Centrix that those drives DON'T usa a standard 2.5" NB hard drive connector (though I can't imagine why not). I'm going to try to find a better pic to be sure.
. See your PM or email.
.bh.

Here comes the :sun: !
 
Nope - needs a special adapter that I have been unable to find. However, I did find plenty of LS-120 drives on eBay. Check your PM.
.bh.

:moon:
 
Originally posted by: Peter
You can't do a legacy floppy disk controller on a PCI card - you'd need access to ISA DMA and IRQ signalling, which is not available in a PCI slot. That's why there are none available, unlike on ISA cards.
Click to expand...

Yep. Same reason that early PCI sound cards had so much trouble doing proper hardware-level emulation of ISA SB cards, and why some mobos like the ABit BX6-2 added an "SBLink" header, to allow the card access to the necessary ISA signals.

The only other option is a hardware chipset-level emulation of the floppy controller (as seen by the "legacy" software), and then the chipset would translate into standard USB protocol commands and communicate with a USB-based floppy drive that way. I'm not aware of any chipsets that implement such functionality though.

(Although, my MSI KT4V-L board appears to implement hardware-level emulation of PS/2 ports, for USB keyboards and mice, not just BIOS-level emulation, so the same thing *could* be done for the floppy-controller hardware interface too.)
 
I'm going to research those couple in the pm plus a few others from Ebay, buy one in the next few days. I'll post next with any problems, sucesses, etc within the next week or so. Going to try it with DVD player both on the same channel as the LS120 and separately. I'll post with any noticeable slowdowns and any conclusions. Thanks for the help on this one.
 
Originally posted by: Zepper
Actually the SiliconImage based PCI IDE/RAID adapter cards (e.g. the Syba from dealsonic or newegg) will work with the LS-120. And if you decide you want to try one of the actual SuperDisk media, remember the tracks are laser-located so clean laser lenses are critical to its operation. The LS-120 locates regular floppy tracks servo-mechanically just like a regular drive.
. And even though slow for an IDE device, it will still blow away any regular floppy drive in reading/writing regular floppy disks. It is wise to avoid writing to a floppy disk that has already been written to by a normal floppy drive. Only write to new disks. The reason is that the write head's track is much narrower than a standard floppy drive's so you can get bleed from the old data surrounding the LS-120 track.
. For best floppy writing results, I recommend copying the data off of a floppy, bulk erase it, reformat with the LS drive, and then write the data back to the floppy.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I didn't know that issue affected LS-120s. Thanks for the info.

(I do know that a similar issue affects 1.2MB floppy drives, writing to 360KB floppies - some 360KB drives can then no longer read those floppies, unless low-level formatted in a real 360KB drive again.)

I always wish that Magneto-optical drives caught on more in the US. I had a 120/230MB Epson SCSI M-O drive given to me, and I found some blank media at a Computer City. They were covered in a thick layer of dust, and didn't even show up in their system anymore. The only ones that they had were singles, pre-formatted for a Mac. So they sold me some 5-packs for cheap. 🙂 The disk cartridges are about the same size as a 3.5in floppy, roughly, except about the thickness of a Zip100 disk. But they are durable as all heck, and fully optical. Downside is they are a bit slow, perhaps it was my drive, but it wouldn't operate properly with SCSI disconnect enabled. Nor would it operate properly with 230MB media, apparently there are two types of 230MB media, some with staggered sector arrangements, and some radial, like the 120MB.
 
Oh, MO has found its niche, and it's still around. Great for archiving stuff, since the media are much more long lived than CDR or DVDR media. Current capacity point is 2.3 GiB, and yes, they still read the 128 MiB 1st generation media. Supply of 128 and 230 MiB media has dried up though.
 
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