News Floppy Disk Kingpin Says Business Has About Four Years Before Hitting Eject Button

fireaza

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May 9, 2011
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Kinda surprised someone hasn't made a floppy disk drive hardware adapter. Some kinda hardware that can be a direct drop-in replacement for a standard floppy drive that allows you to use SD cards or something with the host hardware being none the wiser. Makes more sense than continuing to use floppy disks.
 
Sep 21, 2022
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Kinda surprised someone hasn't made a floppy disk drive hardware adapter. Some kinda hardware that can be a direct drop-in replacement for a standard floppy drive that allows you to use SD cards or something with the host hardware being none the wiser. Makes more sense than continuing to use floppy disks.
Virtual floppy drives you can attach pretty much and disk image/device to has been around since windows 95 and as far as I know it's always been possible with linux and mac after it started using a linux-ish kernel.
 

dimar

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Mar 30, 2009
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I wonder if old machinery can be upgraded with floppy drive emulators where you can use a USB flash drive instead of the diskettes. The emulators use floppy drive connector..
 
Kinda surprised someone hasn't made a floppy disk drive hardware adapter. Some kinda hardware that can be a direct drop-in replacement for a standard floppy drive that allows you to use SD cards or something with the host hardware being none the wiser. Makes more sense than continuing to use floppy disks.
I wonder if old machinery can be upgraded with floppy drive emulators where you can use a USB flash drive instead of the diskettes. The emulators use floppy drive connector..
Gotek floppy emulators are around for ever, originally made for music keyboards that would have floppies to read in new instruments.
You can now find firmware for it to make it work on pretty much any somewhat popular old hardware, dos amiga st and so on.
A simple search on google about gotek firmware will open a whole new world for a lot of people.
(Also available from ebay amazon aliexpress, whatever you prefer)

For anything else there are projects going on to make cheap solutions with the pi.
For example
 

Pollopesca

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Mar 19, 2021
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We've got a few Gotek floppy emulators for servicing legacy metrology controller systems from the 90s. Much easier than trying to get a modern flash drive to work on a Win 95/98 box. When the machine costs 60-500k new and still works, its not surprising clients want to keep them running as long as possible.