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I'm looking for a floppy drive to read and archive a large stack of old floppy disks. Because of their age, I expect many of the disks will have errors. I plan to use ddrescue to make images of these disks to perform data recovery on: ddrescue tries to recover bad sectors by repeatedly reading them, so I need a drive that won't make things worse as it reads the disks.

  • Support for 3.5" IBM-PC HD and DD floppies
  • Must be compatible with ddrescue (shouldn't be a problem, but you never know)

Optional:

  • Support for 5.25" floppies

Interface: USB preferred, but I can work with a standard internal floppy interface as well.

Mark
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    They were essentially commodity components when they were common, and pretty much barely distinguishable from each other. Not sure if they even sell em new. Of course, there's probably a deep dark corner where folk talk about and hoard the good floppy drives for things like this. – Journeyman Geek May 03 '16 at 13:40

1 Answers1

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I found only one solution which supports HD and DD floppies. There is no information about ddrescue compatibility but I couldn't find this information on any floppy drive I was checking.

Floppy Drive

Features:

  • 1.44MB/720k support
  • USB interface
  • PnP

Conclusion:

It's actually quite expensive but if you want to be sure that FDD supports DD and HD diskettes you are 100% sure with this product. If you are looking for cheaper solution maybe there is possibility to find something from second hand on ebay or other like ebay portal but if price isn't to high for you I would recommend this solution.

5.25" thoughts:

For 5.25" floppies I recommend other question because there is no FDD which supports both this formats and meets all your requirements.

ivaan
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