Anyone have a USB 3.5in floppy drive?

I know I can buy a new one on Amazon for $20ish, but I sorta feel like this is the kinda thing someone has laying around and they want to throw it away but don't like throwing stuff away. 

Anyone got something?

In reply to Robbie (Forum Supporter) :

good concept, but if you have a USB floppy drive, you probably have it for a reason.  Probably should get all of the stuff off of our floppy disks and recycle them....

Yeah a regular old floppy drive (or an external one for an old IBM laptop with the proprietary many-pinned connector) is something a person probably has lying around and didn't bother to throw away, a USB floppy drive is something that a person bought and keeps around very much on purpose...ddrescue will be your friend here.

I have one that I am keeping in my archive of old tech to show my grandkids. 

Yes, but I still need it once in a while. My experience is to buy new when you need it, because it won't work after sitting for a few months.

I think we still have a working 5.25" in a computer in back...

Ok, haha. I certainly didn't think about it like that. Sooooo, anyone got any extra tinfoil they aren't using? 

Anyway, I've got a laptop (literally from 1994, it's an IBM 360cs) and it does work and it reads floppies. The floppies have the tune files for my x1/9 on them. The computer must've been used to tune the ECU back in the day.

The laptop monitor doesn't work, so I need to use an external display. Which is going to get annoying fast. 

At some point, I think I will want to get these tune files into a laptop that has a working monitor (and with any luck, a battery) so I can actually datalog while moving. There may be a few ways of moving files from the old laptop to something else, but a USB floppy drive seemed easiest.

Other ideas? Find an old pmcia card with Ethernet adapter? Maybe a serial cable between both computers?

External ide to usb adapter for like $11, pull the drive out of the laptop and hook it up to a modern computer. Like this it's a very useful thing to have around if you have old computers.

I sent mine to Duke cause I was done with it, then saw they cost less new than shipping did. 

I have a handful of PCMCIA Network cards if you want to try that route, but Rev's suggestion would be the easiest.

I had a few old laptops that crapped out, so I pulled the hard drives and popped them into these: 

For $9 I had a new external drive to use for photo backups etc. May work for you to plug your HD into something newer. 

RevRico said:

External ide to usb adapter for like $11, pull the drive out of the laptop and hook it up to a modern computer. Like this it's a very useful thing to have around if you have old computers.

I sent mine to Duke cause I was done with it, then saw they cost less new than shipping did. 

This, those little adapters are super handy, although I find they tend not to work with very old hard drives, like mid-'90s and older. If that's the case, get a laptop IDE to desktop IDE adapter cable and plug the laptop's hard drive into a desktop computer's mainboard, that will work.

In reply to Robbie (Forum Supporter) :

I have one that you can have.  It has a disk in it with pictures from 20 years ago when I bought my house.  I'll move the pics and you can have the device.  

Pm me so I don't forget.

akylekoz said:

In reply to Robbie (Forum Supporter) :

I have one that you can have.  It has a disk in it with pictures from 20 years ago when I bought my house.  I'll move the pics and you can have the device.  

Pm me so I don't forget.

Awesome, you rock!

I've sent a pm and I'll offer to pass it along if anyone else needs it when I'm done.

Yep. And I have a Model A too. 

Well got the drive in the mail today, and it seems to have worked on one of the floppies but not the other. 

But I think that is actually more likely the floppy itself, I never actually tried to read it with the 30 year old laptop either...

Good news is I now have a way to transfer data to and from the 30 year old broken screen laptop - haha.

I've had limited experience w/ 3x of the USB floppy drives, writing/editing CNC programs as text files using Notepad and then loading the program back on to the CNC.  It definitely seemed like some disks (usually) worked, while other disks absolutely would NOT work.  Of course, all the disks were old, had not been stored in clean or climate controlled conditions, and the floppy drive on the CNC was old and not in clean or climate controlled conditions.  I finally started saving the same files on 3-4 floppies in the hope that at least one would work.

Check out the dates these tunes were done. Definitely gives a neat history perspective on the engine management. I'll need to see if I can analyze these files to see what actually was changed.