Does such a product exist - solid state floppy socket drive?

randal

randal

randal

Soldato
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As title really, I know a while back you could get these small drives that plugged directly into the board and ran off the channel's power (or may have had additional molex, can't remember).

I'm wondering if they made one that fits in the floppy connector, as I think that would be dead handy for BIOS/Windows installations if you had something permanently plugged in which you could write to.

I'm losing the floppy drive from my case as it's ugly and takes up room/power that's not really needed considering it gets used once every 12 months, so to have something like this would really help and save me having to dig out the drive.

Before replies come in suggesting using DOS boot USB sticks, remember that for Windows setup to see it the drive has been seen as a floppy on drive A: :)
 
Are you looking for something to load storage drivers etc? Surely nLite is far easier for XP and Vista can look anywhere for drivers.
 
Well yeah you could do it that way, but if I change boards then I have create another ISO burn the disc off etc... At least with this way I just copy the OEM drivers over to it and bung in a vanilla disc, or with BIOS updates I just copy the stuff over onto the volume which will probably have DOS permanently installed on it for boot/flash.

There are plenty of ways to do it agreed, but I was just wondering if anyone had made such a product.
 
usb floppy's don't work in the windows xp setup.

I keep a spare floppy that I plug in when needed (not much) it sits in a drawer the rest of the time. You could fit the floppy internally at the bottom of the case?
 
I'd like to stay away from floppy discs as they have a habit of failing around me, especially part way through an installation...

I think the only way to do this is to get a Floppy to CF adapter and do it that way, which I'm not too keen on because you still have to use a bay, have a cable and power the device.

The other thing that cross my mind is the limitations of floppy technology, which is why they've not made anything like this before - or why it only exists on the IDE channel.
 
randal24 said:
The other thing that cross my mind is the limitations of floppy technology, which is why they've not made anything like this before - or why it only exists on the IDE channel.
Click to expand...

Floppies aren't on the IDE channel. They're on their own totally different controller which is why you can't plug them into a normal 40/80 pin cable.

Both SATA and PATA are the same IDE disks, one just delivers the data in series, the other in parallel. In theory PATA is actually faster, it's just it has issues that cannot be resolved at the moment. When it is resolved, expect to see PATA drives thrash SATA drives out of existence. Except that sadly by then we'll all be on solid state stuff anyway.

Anyway - you are right about the limitations of floppy technology. Because it's totally legacy technology now, no-one is updating the controller chips to work with anything else unfortunately, but why are you still using old-tech XP for goodness sakes? Vista has all those pesky drivers built in (like XP should have;))
 
Ah ha, knew I forgot to reply to this thread. Read the reply on my phone yesterday morning then sieveheaded the reply.

Have seen those CF adapter ma-dos, but they far too akin to floppy drives in so much as they take up a bay and need the usual power/cable requirements. What I really liked about those all in one modules is that they were neat and simple and didn't take up a lot of space.

Given your comments about floppy being now shelved technology, I think I'm going to call off the search and slipstream my drivers into an XP CD for the next reinstall. Then hopefully the one after that will be Vista anyway, provided SP1 is out :) That said XP SP3 slipstreamed might work better for me, I'd like to avoid Vista for as long as I can. It's a nice interface, but doesn't really bring any advantages for me over XP just yet.

What are the issues on PATA that keep it from beating SATA btw? Sounds interesting.
 
The doohickey I was suggesting plugs straight into the motherboard header. It does need a floppy power connector however.
 
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