SMF

Morning all,

The day I've dreaded has finally arrived. I woke up this morning to walk in on a dead floppy disk drive. I load a disk but don't hear that soothing hum of the disk reader clicking away.

I've made some calls re a repair, but most places had some young so and so answer, not knowing much about what I was after. I managed to get onto an older chap at an independent store who was sympathetic to my predicament but said it could cost upward to $1000 plus to repair due to difficulty in obtaining parts.

Does anyone know where I can purchase a new or refurbished 3.5 inch floppy drive?

I know there's now CDs and USBs for data storage, but dag nabbit, I just find those things irritating and downright abominable.

Have a massive catalogue of floppy disks with a whole heap of neat stuff that I cant afford to lose access to!

About five or ten years ago I called a repair place about repairing our store computer's 3.5 floppy; he laughed. My best suggestion would be to try to find a source for old computers, cannibalize them for the drives, and hope for the best. Either that or try to find someone who can copy 3.5 floppies onto some newer media (but that would presuppose they had a 3.5 floppy to work with). Best of luck!

What John said.

I don't know if you'll find one, but best of luck.

Personally, I now keep most everything on portable or external media. I own a couple of WD Passports, and two MyHome externals. The Passports I carry around with me in my work bag, and the externals keep my backups (once monthly, I need to up that to weekly, but keep forgetting).

I am looking to eventually grab a 4TB MyCloud. For the moment, I am waiting to see whether they come out with a RAID variant in a larger capacity as well as improvements to their web-interface for accessing files.

In Australia, do disk drives turn in the opposite direction?

I just need to ask. What operating system are you using?

When I read the subject line I thought of the 5 1/4" floppies, not the 3 1/2".

My suggestion would be to cannibalize an old computer too. If you can't find one let me know. I might have one in an old computer, if I stashed the thing in the shop. Stranger things have happened.

I have few stashed away in a box under a computer desk. If you pay shipping I'll send you a couple so you will have a backup just in case. I will test first before shipping.

I too have some very useful info on those 3 1/2" floppies that I need to keep. I have an external USB floppy drive I use when I need to access them as the 3 computers here don't have floppy drives in them.

DoughBoy68 wrote:...I too have some very useful info on those 3 1/2" floppies that I need to keep. I have an external USB floppy drive I use when I need to access them as the 3 computers here don't have floppy drives in them.

Out of curiosity, why haven't you simply moved this data to another format such as a thumb-drive, memory card, etc.?

Good question jww. Not a bad idea but I guess because no more often than I need to access the info on these disks its much easier and a lot less time consuming to simply plug in the external USB floppy drive than to transfer info from 100 (+/-) floppy disks, some of this stuff is 20 years old. I do have a lot of it (various versions of DOS, Windows and utilities, etc.) on CD's I zipped up and transferred about 10 years ago but still a lot of work. Besides, by the time it would take for me to do it there will be a smaller media device for storing info, makes my head hurt just thinking about it............

jww wrote:What John said.

I don't know if you'll find one, but best of luck.

Personally, I now keep most everything on portable or external media. I own a couple of WD Passports, and two MyHome externals. The Passports I carry around with me in my work bag, and the externals keep my backups (once monthly, I need to up that to weekly, but keep forgetting).

I am looking to eventually grab a 4TB MyCloud. For the moment, I am waiting to see whether they come out with a RAID variant in a larger capacity as well as improvements to their web-interface for accessing files.

Wendell, you sound a lot like me. I backup and store important data on an exteranl HD on two of my computers and also backup daily to the cloud. Only ever had one HD crash and that was like 20 yrs ago. Had an external backup and when I replaced the computer I was able to restore my important data files. Great thing to do. Just wondering, have you ever considered backing up to the cloud?

If you Google 3 1/2" floppy disk drive, you will find lots for sale. Amazon has them for about $13 new and ebay also has lots, mostly used.