[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why are 5 inch USB floppy drives so uncommon?
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Ask HN: Why are 5 inch USB floppy drives so uncommon?
It's easy to buy a 3.5in USB floppy drive for $10 online. In
contrast, I've seen 5in USB floppy drives, but they're not common.
For example, this is a USB controller for $50 - you have to hook up
your own drive and provide a housing.
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html It's unsurprising there's
less demand for them than 3.5in drives, but it seems like the
difference in demand alone can't explain this gap. Is there some
technical issue that makes manufacturing drives like this
difficult? Or am I missing some other part of the picture?
Author : polm23
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-01-07 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
| blihp wrote:
| You vastly underestimate the production gap between those two
| drive types. There were likely at least a couple of _orders of
| magnitude_ more 3.5 " drives in use in their time than 5.25"
| drives were in theirs. I remember my last 5.25" drive costing ~2x
| more than a 3.5" drive in the mid-90's. Also, widespread 5.25"
| drive usage ended 10-15 years before 3.5" drives were superseded
| by flash.
|
| 3.5" was also the last widely used removable magnetic disc and
| used by virtually everyone for a time for backups, in all kinds
| of industrial devices etc the way microSD cards are today. Sure,
| there were Zip disks etc. but those were typically add-on devices
| and had a degree of compatibility issues vs 3.5" drives which
| were standard equipment for well over a decade whether you wanted
| them or not. So the majority of computer users from that era (as
| well as any still in service equipment) are most likely to still
| have, and possibly need replacements for, 3.5" drives since they
| most likely switched over long ago and have been a rapidly
| dwindling replacement market vs 5.25" which was pretty much dead
| by the early 90's.
| [deleted]
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Wow. Zip Disk really takes me back.
|
| A highlight of my childhood was sneaking a pirated copy of Doom
| 2 on a zip disk and secret installing it on a school computer.
| That game was like four 3.5" disks otherwise, not easy to
| conceal.
| interestica wrote:
| Where are you seeing $10 usb/floppy drives?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Amazon, give or take a few dollars.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Likely because the number of 3.5" drives shipped was on the order
| of 100-1000 times greater than 5.25" drives. There are still
| obscure devices shipping which use 3.5" drives.
| myself248 wrote:
| The amount of data on 5.25" disks which is also in standard PC
| formats means that a standard USB-mass-storage implementation
| would have limited use.
|
| There are plenty of archival-quality solutions which perform low-
| level flux imaging of the media, and these do operate over USB.
| Because the 5.25" media saw application in tons of non-PC
| applications, and this is the kind of controller you need to do
| useful work with them.
|
| More info here:
| https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disk...
| datavirtue wrote:
| I remember lusting over 3.5" drives. I had a 32mb hard drive
| before I had a 3.5" floppy.
| jandrese wrote:
| Part of the issue is that while USB and 3 1/2" floppies
| overlapped for some time, the 5 1/4" floppy was already long dead
| by the time USB was introduced. I wouldn't be surprised if the 3
| 1/2" USB floppy drives you buy today are basically the same
| design developed in the late 90s. They're so cheap because
| they've been made the same way for decades now.
|
| The 5 1/4 USB drive is bespoke hardware, which is why it is so
| expensive. I'd imagine it has a more software described interface
| so it can handle the galaxy of incompatible sectoring and
| formatting standards used by different companies back in the day.
| It used to be that if you formatted a floppy on one computer it
| was not likely to work on any other brand of computers. Having
| the formatting details be in software/firmware would make the
| drive far more useful for historians.
| erickhill wrote:
| Depends on the system(s) you are talking about.
|
| For the Commodore 64/128, there are multiple modern solutions
| using both USB and even microSD that emulate 5.25" floppy drives.
| My personal favorite, while not cheap, is the Ultimate1541. Over
| the years, due to its FPGA base, it has grown from a 5" drive
| emulator to way, way more.
| dmurray wrote:
| I think he's looking for the opposite: use a 5.25" floppy on a
| modern computer, instead of convince a vintage computer that
| you've got a compatible floppy disk.
| s_gourichon wrote:
| Not what you're asking for, but hey, this device
| http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html is different from the
| standard USB floppy adapters.
|
| Standard is named UFI, spec at
| https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbmass-ufi10.pdf
|
| UFI does not provide actual low-level access to the drive. It
| only support a few common floppy formats, like 720kB, 1440kB and
| therefore not 1.2MB or 360k of the 5.25 inch floppies.
| TD-Linux wrote:
| UFI does actually support 1.2MB! This is because many Japanese
| computers, like the PC-98, spun their 3.5 inch floppies at
| 360rpm to match the sector layouts of the 5.25 inch one. Many
| USB floppy drives support this - if you insert a 3.5 inch disk
| and format it as 1.2MB you'll hear the pitch of the drive motor
| change.
| stuaxo wrote:
| I've been looking into this and it's straightforward-ish.
|
| The greaseweazle is a new fairly low cost disk controller, and
| you can couple that with a 5.25" enclosure for a CDROM/DVD.
|
| The cheapest way is to buy an old full size external CDROM/DVD
| drive, then scavenge the case.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| Id be ashamed if I was caught with a 5 inch floppy
| madengr wrote:
| Though not an 8 inch floppy.
| jdswain wrote:
| It looks like 5 1/4" drives themselves are getting quite rare,
| not many on eBay, while there are lots of 3.5". So even with a
| controller, getting a drive is not simple.
|
| I'd say the main reason, is that 3.5" drives are much more
| common, and they overlapped USB They are much more standard than
| 5 1/4" drives too.
| smoyer wrote:
| I've got a few in my basement ... my email is in my profile and
| if you'd like one, send me your shipping address. As a note, I'm
| about to throw out a huge pile of legacy electronics (I believe I
| have over half a ton going to the recycling facility so if
| there's a broad interest in old hardware, I could put together a
| list for the community.
|
| I'm going to part out an old Sun E450 and use the chassis and
| power supplies for a 40 node Kubernetes cluster. There are 20
| 7200 RPM 18GB SCSI drives in there as well as four CPU/memory
| units.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Definitely don't throw this stuff out. Especially with
| lockdowns around the world there's lots of hobbyist hackers
| around that would love nothing more than their hands on this
| stuff. And if you have any truly exotic hardware give @foone a
| shout on twitter, he does amazing write-ups on all sorts of
| crazy shit :)
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Why are yellowing Tandys and monochrome (green) monitors out of
| style? Young people are scum.
| Aeronwen wrote:
| There's no money in it. They couldn't sell enough to justify the
| costs of designing and building them.
| brk wrote:
| The 3.5" drives had no practical disadvantages as compared to
| 5.25" drives, so the 5.25" units really declined in popularity
| and were EOL'd in most cases long before 3.5" drives disappeared.
| IIRC the interfaces and pinouts were different too.
|
| I would imagine that for many people, they moved any valuable
| data on 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks during the roughly decade of
| overlap of the two drive types.
|
| I doubt there is enough of a market demand for legacy 5.25" disks
| where the data doesn't already exist on other mediums to make it
| worthwhile to offer any kind of modern interface.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Bookmarking this as I am in a kick off for a project that needs
| to archive data in a regulated industry and the scope includes
| 5.25" drives. There always somebody!
| robotnikman wrote:
| Considering that people are archiving from other types of old
| media such as video game cartridges, its not too farfetched
| of an idea. There is probably a lot of valuable data still
| residing on some old 5.25 floppies
| [deleted]
| achairapart wrote:
| Wondering about the price for the 8" version.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I actually almost bought a device with an 8" floppy drive. The
| device was not powering and I'm not an EE, and there were no
| discs for it anyway. I had a brief interest in maybe making my
| own, and did a little bit of research, but couldn't find much.
| IIRC I found one device that supposedly could interface 8"
| drives to a modern PC, but it seemed pretty involved. I ended
| up not buying the device, and kinda regret it now.
| andrewf wrote:
| I'll speculate. Companies started making these things in the late
| 90s, when it made sense. In 2020, it might make sense to _keep_
| selling drives. But nobody would _start_ making and selling these
| drives today.
|
| A few things happened around the turn of the century: USB came
| in, 3.5" floppies went away, and laptops started to replace
| desktops for more people. 3.5" was clearly not the future, but
| customers had lots of recent work and data on them, that they
| needed to access from their new computers.
|
| The likes of Apple and Sony sold 3.5" USB drives with their new
| laptops (for way more than $10!). At some later point, Apple and
| Sony's customers had moved on, but the ecosystem of parts
| vendors, remaining customers, sellers etc would've been enough
| for the cheap generic vendors to move in.
|
| What happened instead with 5.25"? I'd say: the market was
| smaller, because 10 years of growth hadn't happened yet. The
| market was much more fragmented, most computers/OSes couldn't
| read disks written on another vendor's system. There were fewer
| pieces of $$$$ equipment (synthesizers, industrial controllers)
| that embedded them. And finally, the 5.25" -> 3.5" transition was
| pre-USB and pre-laptop, so desktop users just bought desktops
| with two non-portable drives using the native disk interface.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| 3.5" disks were in use partially into the 2000s and didn't really
| disappear until rewriteable flash media became common, cheap, and
| well supported among operating systems--which is about the time
| when Windows XP more or less took over 9x as the most common
| consumer OS.
|
| 5" disks were well on their way to being rare in 1990. I'd wager
| no system after the Pentium came out (and probably earlier, like
| maybe '92 or so) had a built-in 5" drive unless carried over from
| an older system.
| cflat wrote:
| 5.25" floppy disks are more likely to suffer physical damage at
| this point in history than a 3.5" disk. This would also
| contribute to the supply-demand curve biasing to 3.5" (on top of
| the ubiquity argument)
|
| 3.5" have a more durable design - the hard plastic, the spring
| loaded shield and, most importantly, the center disk that rested
| on the enclosure housing that prevented the magnetic medium from
| sagging.
|
| When 5.25" disks are stored on end, they sag over time causing
| them to physically be unreadable. You have to store them flat.
| 3.5" are (mostly) resistant to this sag and therefore will be
| more likely to survive long term.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I dont have a working 5.25" or 8" floppy drive anymore; I
| wouldn't trust the 3.5" i have.
|
| imo floppy drives found in the field today, if working at all,
| are likely to only speak to themselves and not share media with
| another drive due to age and alignment issues. maybe one could
| detune a new drive to match an older ones quirks if necessary.
|
| I think the better approach is to treat reading the media as a
| one time recovery and then emulate the drive electrically; if
| you're working with an actual 5" disk somewhere. IIRC there's
| arduino boards that pretend to be a floppy drive and serve sd
| card images.
| moonbug wrote:
| Might as well ask why there are no 8" ones.
| alanfranz wrote:
| I don't see 5.25" disks since C64. All the PCs I have seen since
| 1990 had 3.5" drives, and that was the PC boom time. I doubt that
| there are a lot of 5.25 disks around, as many would have been
| converted already to 3.5".
|
| On the contrary, I (40yo) own some 3.5 floppies (a couple of old
| big box pc games).
| jedberg wrote:
| Almost everyone who had 5.25" media already converted it to 3.5"
| in the 90s.
|
| My first computer was 5.25" only, but when I built my second
| computer I put in one of those fancy new 3.5" drives along with a
| super fancy dual 5.25" and 3.5" combo drive. One of the first
| things I did was back up all my 5.25" disks to 3.5" and also copy
| them to the fancy hard drive I had in the new computer.
|
| Going from having 2 5.25" drives to having a hard drive and and
| 3.5" drive was an explosion in storage space and it just didn't
| make sense to keep using the 5.25" disks, especially given their
| high failure rates.
|
| Everyone I knew at the time did the same thing. 3.5" was vastly
| superior in storage and reliability (as long as you knew how to
| fix the springs in the metal covers on the disks).
| arthurcolle wrote:
| in a similar vein, I love those mini CDs but they seem to have
| completely disappeared from the face of the earth. It's a shame,
| they were super cute.
| interestica wrote:
| I think with a lot of 'slot style' disk drives, those were
| incompatible. Made them a lot less practical.
| myself248 wrote:
| I concur, especially given that automotive CD players are
| almost universally slot-loading. (And the rest are caddy-
| loading changers, which also only work with 120mm full-size
| discs.) That's the only thing I've burned CDs for in the last
| decade or so, thus 80mm minis are right out.
| SecurityMinded wrote:
| At the risk of pointing the obvious, did you think about when USB
| became prevalent and made almost any peripheral external, there
| were no more 5.25" floppy drives getting built into the machines.
| It is just the economies of scale. People who needed 5'25 inch
| floppy drives, either had one somehow or they converted their old
| media already. If there are handful of people who still are using
| or dependent on these devices, well, sorry, but you will either
| have to develop one using an Arduino/RasPi combo one way or
| another, or seek it from an obscure hardware supplier.
| cesaref wrote:
| Yeah, well try and find an 8 inch floppy drive and USB
| controller... ;)
| kleer001 wrote:
| 5.25" floppies were on their way out in the mid 1980s, USB was
| born in the late 1990s and 3.5" disks were still around and in
| high use then. It's a generational thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#History
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History
|
| The same reason there aren't Apple, Amiga, or Android branded
| Morse code keys.
| polm23 wrote:
| I guess that makes sense, but the cheap USB drives you find on
| Amazon are of recent manufacture, so for some reason it makes
| sense to keep making them.
| foobarian wrote:
| How else do you expect me to download pictures from my Sony
| Mavica /s
| kleer001 wrote:
| Oh, man, I remember when that was state of the art and
| everyone in the computer art department would sign up weeks
| ahead to get a day's use of it and fill that disk with like
| 12 images.
|
| When was this? 1997.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| It might have changed by now, but at least a few years ago
| 3.5" floppies were still used to exchange crucial information
| in the health sector here in Norway.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Lots of legacy systems, industrial machines etc. still use
| 3.5" floppies, so many people will still have a need to write
| them with modern computers to transfer stuff to these
| machines. My mom actually has a fancy sewing machine that
| uses 3.5" floppies for patterns and she uses a usb floppy
| drive to write to it.
| sixothree wrote:
| You mention USB as well. Some people fail to remember that many
| 3.5" floppy drives in laptops used a USB connection internally.
| Maybe for that reason the chip already exists where a 5.25 does
| not.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| In addition to all the other reasons, 5.25" floppy _disks_ were
| genuinely 'floppy' and easily damaged by wear and tear, so there
| are far fewer of them around in sufficiently good condition to be
| worth trying to read.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I had far more 3.5" floppies fail than 5.25" The "protective"
| door often blew up or would come apart in the drive. The hard
| shell and protective door would lead to people throwing the
| discs everywhere. The 5.25" was meticulously stored in a sleeve
| and disc case, only being exposed when inserting into the
| drive. Every time I find a 5.25" it glistens like brand new.
| Good luck getting data off any of these after sitting for a
| decade. I had to refresh discs (rewrite all the data) after
| sitting for only a few years.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I have a BBC Model B and a BBC Master, both with 51/4" drives.
| They were used a lot in British schools, and hung around into the
| early 1990s -- schools had invested in software for them, but
| didn't have the budget to replace them.
|
| My dad had an IBM 286 clone, which is the oldest computer I can
| remember using (Captain Comic!). That had both 51/4" and 90mm1
| floppy drives, but we almost always used the latter.
|
| All these machines were very expensive at the time, and not very
| common for home use. Are there any popular old computers
| (Commodore, Amiga, Mac etc) that used a 51/4" drive? My
| impression is everything was on cassette, until 90mm drives
| became cheap enough for home use. (Even the BBC machines sold for
| home use usually used cassettes; the disk drive was a separate,
| expensive purchase -- double the cost of the computer itself!2)
|
| 1 Yes, I'm that much of a metric purist.
|
| 2 http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/BBCBI3....
| tssva wrote:
| The prevalence of 5 1/4" drives in 80's home computers appears
| to have been very regional. In Europe they seem to have been
| very rare and as you stated most home users utilized cassette
| tape storage. At the time 5 1/4" drives were less expensive in
| the US and US households had significantly higher median
| incomes than those in many parts of Europe which led to much
| wider adoption of floppy drives in the US.
|
| In the 80's we had three family computers with 5 1/4" drives. A
| TRS-80 Model I, IBM PC XT and near the end of the 80's a
| Gateway 386 system. I believe the 386 system also included a 3
| 1/2" drive.
|
| In addition I had my own Commodore 64 with a 5 1/4" floppy. All
| of my friends, which was a decent number, who had a C64 also
| had floppies. If you went into a store there was little to no
| software available on tape for any systems with the exception
| of Radio Shacks where they had tape based software for Tandy
| Coco's which were not particularly popular systems.
| myself248 wrote:
| > Are there any popular old computers (Commodore, Amiga, Mac
| etc) that used a 51/4" drive? My impression is everything was
| on cassette, until 90mm drives became cheap enough for home
| use.
|
| Your impression is very much mistaken. The Commodore 64 and
| Apple // were both equipped with 5 1/4" drives quite
| frequently, as were the Atari 400/800, the Tandy CoCo, etc. The
| TI 99/4A was usually found with cartridges and tapes, but could
| be equipped with a peripheral expansion box including a 5 1/4"
| drive.
|
| Anecdotally as a kid growing up in the 80s, 5 1/4"s were
| everywhere and I didn't see my first 90mm disk until years
| later.
| ansible wrote:
| Yes, the 5.25in drives were phasing out by 1990, in part
| because of the IBM PS/2 series computers. It wasn't uncommon
| to buy software that had the option of either (or in some
| cases both) in the early 1990's.
|
| What was really rare were the 8in floppy drives. Those were
| mostly on more expensive business systems (Tandy Model 2 for
| example) and minicomputers. I don't think I ever got to use a
| system that had those.
| moonbug wrote:
| > 90mm
|
| Ah, technical correctness, the _best_ sort of correctness.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Are there any popular old computers (Commodore, Amiga, Mac
| etc) that used a 51/4" drive?
|
| Yes. Pretty much all PCs prior to the PS/2 era (so, the IBM PC,
| XT, and AT, and clones thereof, but not the PS/1, which, oddly,
| was later than the PS/2) came with them as internal drives
| (except the lower-end model of the PCjr). They were also common
| accessories to the Apple II/IIe/II+ computers (and I think the
| IIc, though I never saw either one of those in the wild).
| rjsw wrote:
| The Apple II usually had 51/4" drives. They were available for
| 8-bit Atari systems and the Commodore 64 too.
| dboreham wrote:
| I sense an assumption that both sizes are equally likely to be
| required and available. That's quite untrue. 5.25 floppies
| immediately vanished from the market when 3.5 became available.
| That was a long time ago. So you have the entire lifetime of 3.5
| disks elapsing after the demise of 5.25. We're now roughly 20
| years after the demise of the 3.5 disk so both demand for and
| availability of the older 5.25 is very low.
| ufmace wrote:
| I wonder why they vanished immediately. When 3.5" disks came
| out, didn't people have data on 5.25" disks they wanted to
| continue to access for a while? I would have thought they'd be
| kept around as second drives on newer computers of the time for
| at least a few years.
| ansible wrote:
| 5.25in drives did not vanish immediately. The transition
| occurred over a period of years. What really got things going
| in PC compatible land was the PS/2 series of desktops from
| IBM, which couldn't even fit a 5.25in drive in the case.
|
| At around that time it was somewhat common to buy a new PC
| that had both 5.25in and 3.5in drives, and the common clone
| makers (Gateway, Packard Bell, et al) could fit either or
| both in their more-or-less standard PC/AT form factor cases.
|
| For a while you could buy software that was on either format,
| and in some cases, like for utility software (Norton, etc.)
| they would include both in the box. Back when you still
| bought software in boxes...
| ohazi wrote:
| The PC was still in its exponential growth phase during each
| of these transitions.
|
| So the total number of computers built with 5.25" vs. 3.5"
| drives likely differed by at least a few orders of magnitude.
| Today's USB/SD-only devices outnumber all of the previous
| generations combined by several more orders of magnitude.
|
| Fewer computers means fewer software releases and fewer files
| that warrant rescuing. I think there was just dramatically
| less stuff to copy.
| toast0 wrote:
| They didn't vanish completely immediately, but it was pretty
| fast.
|
| When 3.5" drives came out, people were mostly buying first
| computers. A new computer user wouldn't have any old data,
| and most likely could find software on 3.5" disks as easily
| as 5.25" (unless they were buying seriously old software).
| You could certainly buy computers with both, and you could
| add a 5.25" drive to most computers if you needed to, but
| 3.5" was so clearly better that few people would.
| sixothree wrote:
| Some older computers added 3.5 drives to them. You would
| sometimes see both present in a computer. But when you bought
| a new computer you rarely considered getting both.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Why do you think the "the difference in demand alone can't
| explain this gap"?
| benibela wrote:
| In school I was thought: with lower demands, come lower prices
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Somebody failed to communicate you the big picture.
|
| Usually, prices are higher if the demand is consistently
| lower. But that's not a certainty.
|
| Anyway, production and consumption are in (near) equilibrium,
| and the price is the communication channel that brings that
| (near) equilibrium. That doesn't imply in any price level,
| it's only a communication channel, where both sides input
| their preferences and settle on some value. The actual value
| depends on what are both sides preferences.
| dsr_ wrote:
| You left out a part:
|
| For commodity goods, lowering the demand will lower the price
| towards the marginal cost of production.
|
| A commodity good is interchangeable: you don't care whether
| you buy a bushel of winter wheat from Farmer A or Farmer B. A
| commodity good is produced by many entities and desired by
| many entities.
|
| Some goods are not commodities but are substitutable: when
| AMD made pin-compatible 386 and 486 processors, you didn't
| care much about whether a 40MHz 386 came from Intel or AMD,
| which is why AMD's lower prices let them build their
| marketshare substantially.
|
| If a widget isn't being produced at all, just sitting in a
| warehouse, the price can easily be governed by:
|
| - the person who needs a hundred of them vs the warehouse
| that would like to no longer pay an inventory tax on the 110
| in stock
|
| - the broker who knows where the last hundred widgets are
| stored, and has figured out customers who really need them in
| ones and tens
|
| - the warehouse that thinks it has all the remaining widgets
| in the world, and advertises them at a high price to see if
| anybody wants them
| andrewf wrote:
| Lower demand would be a shift from D2 back to D1 on this
| chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand#/media
| /File:...
|
| But if the demand curve shifts leftwards or downwards enough,
| it won't intersect with the supply curve _at all_. At that
| point, the model says commerce halts because there 's no
| price that both sellers and buyers are willing to trade at.
| polm23 wrote:
| I imagine there's little demand for 3.5in drives but they're
| readily available. Maybe the difference in demand is more than
| I assume it to be.
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps the missing piece of information is that: nobody
| makes any of these drives any more. The 3.5 drives sold are
| either old stock or refurbished. Heck I bought my last one
| (to make bootable floppy images for some patent litigation
| project) probably 10 years ago and that one was a refurb.
| kps wrote:
| Or _not_ refurbished, according to what I recall reading on
| some vintage-computer discussion -- the typical Amazon-
| grade USB floppy drives contain scrap pulls that may or may
| not still work.
| codingdave wrote:
| I suspect the difference in demand is huge. I still have
| stacks of 3.5" disks sitting around the house. I haven't had
| a 5.25" inch disk sitting around since the early 90s.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| I'm about the same here. I should really order a USB 3.5"
| drive to get the last data off them this year.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I got one about a decade ago as a just in case... it's in
| my garage somewhere, still in the box.
| eatingCake wrote:
| Doesn't the magnetic data on the disks fade over that
| time scale?
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