10 Dec
2003
10 Dec
'03
5:01 a.m.
Those USB floppy drives generally use a "SCSI protocol over USB transport"
scheme (this is in fact the way the USB mass-storage standard works AFAIK, so
floppy drives aren't the only things that do this), so I would be VERY
suprised if there's any "standard" floppy drive in there that you could
just
swap out for a different type.
J.C. Wren said:
I wonder where the smarts are? If the controller is
in the drive, you may be
limited to the formats you can read. I.e., you may be stuck with whatever
sectors per track and track counts that are supposed on "normal" PC drives.
Perhaps someone should buy one of these and take it apart...
--jc
On Wednesday 10 December 2003 13:26 pm, chris wrote:
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
I'm
sure one can be built, but I've seen drives like these before (but for
the Macintosh).
I just saw a 3.5" USB drive this morning connected to a Dell. From the
looks of it, that is they way Dell was delivering the drive for that
computer (it was a tiny little tower like unit and had no floppy built
in).
So they are available for more than just the Mac. I think the one I
bought for my father's iMac (so he can transfer pics from his Mavica
camera) was not Mac specific and was supported by Windows and Linux
according to the box (but the drive sucks, its PAINFULLY slow to copy
data, far slower than the USB bus so the speed isn't killed by that...
IIRC, its a "SanDisk" brand drive, but I could be wrong).
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>