SomeGuy
Veteran Member
Another surprise from my local Microcenter: They had a new, different batch of USB floppy drives on the shelf. On the back of the box they said they support 720k disks! I know that there have been some out there that can do this, but it seems hard to nail down a good source for these.
So I grabbed one and tested it out. Sure enough, right out of the box it could read and write standard DOS formatted 1.44mb and 720k disks! From DOS, at least on the machine I used without any additional drivers, it ignored the low-level command and only verified the disk when formatting. Windows XP format doesn't know what to do with 720k disks from the GUI, but from the command line it seemed to low-level format a blank 720k disk just fine. I verified that the disk was readable in a normal drive.
Another surprise was when I fed it a 1.7mb (21 sector) formatted disk. It seemed to read it OK. I verified that it could correctly read a file that filled the entire disk. However... it totally crapped its pants and corrupted the file system when writing to it both in DOS and Windows!
The box also mentions 360RPM mode operation used by the Japanese 3.5" 1.25mb format, but I didn't test that.
This is a link to the product on the Microcenter web site: http://www.microcenter.com/product/420667/144MB_USB_External_Floppy_Disk_Drive_-_Black
But the box they show on the site looks different from what was in the store. In the store it was just a brown cardboard box labeled "USB Portable Diskette Drive". The drive itself is only labeled "USB Floppy Drive" "Made in China E77FCD393L" with no branding. The device manager identifies it as a "Y-E Data USB Floppy". So there is no telling if there will be any consistency as to what is really in the product. Still, might grab another one.
Interestingly these cost less than the Bytecc USB drives that can't read 720k.
Didn't see any more normal 1.44mb drives. I may have grabbed the last one from here a few months ago, although their site lists them for other locations. They do have several all-in-one card readers with a floppy that use the normal FDD interface instead of USB. I't crazy how they don't have any USB multi-card reader floppies even though they have other USB devices in them.
So I grabbed one and tested it out. Sure enough, right out of the box it could read and write standard DOS formatted 1.44mb and 720k disks! From DOS, at least on the machine I used without any additional drivers, it ignored the low-level command and only verified the disk when formatting. Windows XP format doesn't know what to do with 720k disks from the GUI, but from the command line it seemed to low-level format a blank 720k disk just fine. I verified that the disk was readable in a normal drive.
Another surprise was when I fed it a 1.7mb (21 sector) formatted disk. It seemed to read it OK. I verified that it could correctly read a file that filled the entire disk. However... it totally crapped its pants and corrupted the file system when writing to it both in DOS and Windows!
The box also mentions 360RPM mode operation used by the Japanese 3.5" 1.25mb format, but I didn't test that.
This is a link to the product on the Microcenter web site: http://www.microcenter.com/product/420667/144MB_USB_External_Floppy_Disk_Drive_-_Black
But the box they show on the site looks different from what was in the store. In the store it was just a brown cardboard box labeled "USB Portable Diskette Drive". The drive itself is only labeled "USB Floppy Drive" "Made in China E77FCD393L" with no branding. The device manager identifies it as a "Y-E Data USB Floppy". So there is no telling if there will be any consistency as to what is really in the product. Still, might grab another one.
Interestingly these cost less than the Bytecc USB drives that can't read 720k.
Didn't see any more normal 1.44mb drives. I may have grabbed the last one from here a few months ago, although their site lists them for other locations. They do have several all-in-one card readers with a floppy that use the normal FDD interface instead of USB. I't crazy how they don't have any USB multi-card reader floppies even though they have other USB devices in them.