Flash drive in place of floppy

[xmitr]

Is there an emulator available which would connect to the floppy cable and allow you to plug a flashdrive into it? We have a scientific instrument which has a floppy for firmware upgrades and storage of operating files, but there is no usb port on the instrument. We'd like to use flashdrive instead of floppies.

 

[jackschmittusa]

I have never seen or heard of such an adapter.

 

[Lorne]

Me nether, Im still amazed that most enthusiest motherboards even come with a floppy drive controller, Waste of space and resorces.

Only thing Ive ever known to be hooked to the floppy controller other then,,, Is a tape drive, And are just as slow.
I went through the same kinda process trying to upgrade old optical photo printers and it came down to,,,
Does your equipment have a PCI slot and run atleast win95, You can get a USB ad on card.
If your equipment has a standard HD (ATA) controller, There is or was a USB adapter that can be hooked to it, Ive only seen them online and at the time the price was scary, But I also think it supports most memory cards as well, But Im not sure how drivers work if any at all.

 

[tynopik]

http://www.partstore.com/Part/...VFSD50U.aspx?s=froogle

but the part about drivers make me leery

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: xmitr
Is there an emulator available which would connect to the floppy cable and allow you to plug a flashdrive into it? We have a scientific instrument which has a floppy for firmware upgrades and storage of operating files, but there is no usb port on the instrument. We'd like to use flashdrive instead of floppies.

Yes there is such a device.
I helped create it.
The device works by completely replacing the floppy drive with an interface that accepts memory cards.

The floppy is a dumb interface, meaning the drive itself has no processor of its own.
It relies on the host pc for everything , from start motor, move head, read bit, move head, read bit, stop motor. It was done this way because at the time of its invention a cpu was expensive and putting one in a floppy drive was considered a waste since you already had a cpu on the host.

To do the interface requires a cpld, a cpu, memory, eprom to store the code.
You basically have to emulate a floppy on the cpu, read data off the memory card and convert it to the floppies format. It does not allow you to use a floppy interface as a card reader like a usb port would. Your limited to the 1.4mb file size.

To make the floppy port a usb like reader is not possible without re-writing bios files and even then it may have chipset limitations.

Total cost is about 200.00 per device so its not something for the casual user.
The only reason we did this is because we had 5 systems that are non replaceable that require firmware updates and only have a floppy interface that can be used.

We wanted to make the device public but ran into a problem with Nec.
Nec gave us some code that was necessary for the design and have refused to allow it to be made public. Without that code its not possible to make the device.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: tynopik
http://www.partstore.com/Part/...VFSD50U.aspx?s=froogle

but the part about drivers make me leery

Yeah, its just streaming data off the card through the port to a windows driver.
Its going to be painfully slow as well.
Max for the port is 500kb/sec

 

[potato28]

Originally posted by: Lorne
Me nether, Im still amazed that most enthusiest motherboards even come with a floppy drive controller, Waste of space and resorces.

Some SCSI, RAID and LAN controllers still ship out on 3.5"s, so mobo manufactures just include them.

 

[xmitr]

Thanks for the responses folks. Our main concern was the unreliability of floppies and floppy drives. If something fails during the firmware upgrade we're screwed. Too bad there don't seem to be any other options. There isn't a hard drive or pci interface on the machine. Guess we'll have to test test test (both drive and diskette) before performing the actual upgrade.

 

[Zepper]

tynopic,

That thing still requires a floppy drive to work and that is what the OP doesn't want

OP,
There are four brands of floppy drives that give less problems than others (in my experience): Alps, NEC, Panasonic/Matsushita and YE Data - used to be Toshiba too but they've long since stopped making FDDs. Use one of those with a good brand of fresh diskette (Sony or Imation) and you shouldn't have any problem (diskettes stored in a damp location can grow fungus so keep your disks sealed from moisture for longest usable life).

.bh.