Interesting find - Floppy Drive emulator allowing USB Flash to act as Floppy

[DaveLembke]

Interesting find - Floppy Drive emulator allowing USB Flash to act as Floppy.

Was window shopping online looking to see if there were any bargains and this snagged my attention.

Might pick one of these up out of sheer curiosity. Its been ages since I needed to use a floppy disk and last time I was able to scrounge up a dusty but still working floppy drive to use an old 1.44MB disk and flash a BIOS for a Pentium 4 computer. Curious if this device would truly bridge USB Flash Drive technology with an older system that only supports Floppy or Hard Drive booting, a system too old to support USB Boot like an older Windows 95 computer that had a single USB 1.0 or 1.1 port that only worked as a USB port after the OS loaded drivers for it but otherwise the BIOS did not support booting through USB like modern and somewhat modern computers manufactured for the last 10 or so years.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA42262U5839

The LED display on it reminds me of an older 386 Everex computer I had many years ago that had a display that would show what drive was being accessed and what sectors were in use on drives. Just found my old computer on google images. The yellow display on front panel was kind of cool but not sure what other purpose it actually served other than I guess if you wanted data placed on a quicker location on a drive platter, I suppose you might be able to verify its sector/track location and shave off some ms. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_tkm9v4opNG8/TJ0vZ35QWKI/AAAAAAAADuk/1jmMR6LvYlY/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Everex+386+flyer+from+1989.jpg

When i installed Windows 95 to the Everex Step 386 running 8MB RAM it was a very noisy boot of hard drive activity and the yellow matrix display on front panel was flashing fast all the read sector locations etc. I wish I kept that computer but its been gone for about 20 years now. Gave it to a friend because it was just a 386 at the time and they were easy to come by and it wasnt really a classic yet to have collector value with me, but its unusual sector display was cool although lost with its purpose other than to mesmerize with the cool geek bling factor. 

[Mark.]

nice idea, be even cooler if it also emulated the whir-whir sound of floppy read/writes. 

[strollin]

Looks interesting but it says it will appear as a 1.44MB floppy.  Seems kind of a waste of a USB drive which generally have much larger capacities.  Could be useful for software that only comes on a floppy and insists on being run from the A: drive. 

Many years ago when I first started uses flash memory, I had a device that looked like a 1.44MB floppy disk that I could put a Smart memory card in (from my camera).  I could then put the floppy disk into the drive and it would act as a giant floppy disk with whatever capacity the Smart Card was.

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[BC_Programmer]

The emulator works via Floppy disk images. You have to arrange a number of Floppy diskette images on the USB drive in a particular fashion. It gets installed and connected as a Floppy drive, then when installed and running, you can use the buttons to switch the "current" floppy disk that is active. That is what the LED Display is for, it shows the current image number.

[strollin]

That makes sense and then doesn't "waste" the capacity of the thumb drive.

[Salmon Trout]

Ah, the FlashPath. Late 90s. It has an electromagnet coil that sits under the floppy head. The gadget can send/receive to/from the floppy controller via the coil. Needs 2 coin cells. You have to install a driver on the PC before the adapter can be 'seen' and so you need a PC and OS that can run the driver.

[DaveLembke]

Cool Info everyone ... Thanks BC for clarifying its functionality too... Just think of the stack of floppies you cold have on a flash drive. 

There must be a limit though. The LED display doesnt have placeholders for that kind of value to select to, and it would take a while to get there at 1 increment per button push.

[BC_Programmer]

From what I've learned/seen of them, There is no effective limit. You can have multiple "sets" of 1000 images, however there is no display of the "active" set. All the features are done by various combinations of holding buttons. I don't know what switching sets is, but navigating within a "set" is done by pressing one button to increment the ones digit upwards (which wraps around) the other button to increment the ten's digit (which also wraps around) and you increment the hundreds digit by pressing both buttons- so you don't have to go through them one by one.

Apparently it also has a feature whereby you can have the files directly in folders and it will expose a floppy disk with the contents of that folder up to 1.44MB.

(Note: I don't have one but I've seen a few hardware videos that cover it)

[DaveLembke]

Cool BC and value going wrapping back to 0 for 1000 if 3 digit display after 999 makes sense.