FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller • Hacker News Board

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#51

Post by Gregordinary » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:30 AM UTC

wanderingjew wrote: post #15

bcoates wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This acts as a controller that attaches to a conventional PC floppy disk drive (which does not have internal controller electronics like a modern hard drive). It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge

For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are especially broken in nearly all modern OSes. I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work. Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bi…

Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and jazip.

With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.

I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#52

Post by deviceside » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:47 AM UTC

forinti wrote: post #3

AFAIK, the cables were identical in 3.5" and 5.25" drives. So this interface probably works for both. I swapped out a 5.25" drive on a BBC Micro for a modern 3.5" drive and even got it to work using HD media (the BBC used SD).

The physical track format is different between 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Our product is intended for use with 5.25" drives only. Please do not purchase our product for use reading 3.5" disks. USB 3.5" floppy drives were commercially available from TEAC and Y-E DATA.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#53

Post by deviceside » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #4

Isn't there an USB FDD standard? Why are they using a proprietary protocol instead of that?

The standard to which you're referring, UFI, supports only 3 media types, all of which are 3.5". It is no use for 5.25" disks. The broader Mass Storage Class is also no use because the built-in OS drivers for MSC assume that the device has a single media type or the hardware can auto-detect the media type. We use a vendor-specific command set so the host can specify parameters to read a variety of formats, including non-PC formats.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#54

Post by deviceside » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #8

I see that it's been tested up to MacOS Sierra. I wonder if this could be used on Catalina. I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS. Which is disappointing.

It can be used up to Mojave. The current drivers don't work on Catalina. We hope to release an update soon, but there is no ETA.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#55

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #49

The computer I use today still has 3.5" floppy drive.

[deleted]

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#56

Post by bcrl » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 1:37 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #40

WalterBright wrote: post #25

I always wondered why PCs maintained support for 3.5" disks, but not for 5.25". Fortunately, beforehand I had presciently copied my hundreds of floppies to CD-ROMs. But I still keep finding more :-)

PCs still support for 5.25" discs, but the 3.5" disks are better (smaller, more durable, more data per disk, unless you're comparing 5.25" high density vs 3.5" double density. By the 90s, cd-rom was clearly the future, but a boot disk came in handy, so one floppy drive was enough for most people. 3.5" disks also had the 2.88 drives, and LS-120 drives with compatible form factors.

5.25" floppies were more way reliable than 3.5" in my experience. 3.5" floppy media had the problem of varying wildly in quality, and the quality of otherwise good brands had the tendency to decrease over time. I also have memories of 1.2MB HD 5.25" floppies being quite a bit faster than 3.5" floppies back in the 80s.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#57

Post by aidenn0 » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

Girlang wrote: post #47

aidenn0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the USB FDD standard does not support telling the device what type of disk is inserted. This supports far more than the IBM compatible disks that can be determined just from the notches.

The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity

Wow you're right, that was 3.5" only.

The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller.

According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#58

Post by ansible » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 2:42 AM UTC

simonblack wrote: post #48

Most PC-style drives can't read the second side of "flippy" disks That's baloney. The whole idea of a 'flippy disk' was to be able to read the second side of a single-sided disk. To make a flippy-disk you merely had to make an index hole in the correct position of the floppy's envelope and a write-enable notch in the correction position of the envelope also. I made a cardboard template to mark those positions and use…

Making a flippy disk was to use the back side of a floppy when you only had a single-sided drive (like I did back in the day).

If you put a flippy disk into a double-sided drive which is expecting to read double-sided disks, you're going to have a bad day. The data on the back side of a flippy disk is written backwards compared to how it would be written on the back side by a double-sided floppy drive.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#59

Post by snvzz » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #49

The computer I use today still has 3.5" floppy drive.

Many of my computers which I still use do.

But my main workstation doesn't. The primary reason is the motherboard lacks a floppy controller.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#60

Post by skissane » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #57

Girlang wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity

Wow you're right, that was 3.5" only. The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller. According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.

I remember our first computer (a 386SX16/20) which my Dad bought sometime around 1989/1990, started out with two 5.25 inch floppy drives – a 1.2MB drive and a 360KB drive, so we could write 360KB disks without corrupting them. (My Dad thought this was important, I guess it was somewhat back then.)

Soon he decided we needed a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well. But he didn't want to give up having both the 1.2MB and 360KB 5.25 inch drives. The existing floppy controller only supported 2 floppy drives, so he went and bought a new one which supported four floppy drives. The chassis had enough drive bays to fit all three floppies and a 40MB hard disk. We had to make some changes to CONFIG.SYS (maybe an installable device driver??) since BIOS/DOS couldn't detect more than 2 floppy drives by default.