Floppy drive

[DanL]

I found a couple of ancient floppy disks that it would be fun to read. I also have, buried long ago, a VST USB Floppy Drive (Model FDUSB). Now, I understand that as of 10.11, MacOS doesn't handle floppies anymore, but I plugged it into two different 10.6 machines, which allegedly can handle floppies natively (without a driver). Pushed a disk in, and it spun and buzzed, and then stopped. Nothing appeared on the desktop.

Is my drive kaput? Or is there some trick to getting 10.6 to see floppies with such a device?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

I just grabbed my LaCie USB Floppy Disk Drive from storage, connected it to my iMac running macOS Sierra 10.12.6, and it reads/writes floppy disks fine. They mount normally in Finder. Also, no driver needed for OS X/macOS.

Sounds like there may be an issue with the VST drive itself, since it wasn't recognized on multiple Macs.

C

 

[DanL]

Thank you. That is what I was suspecting. But I'm puzzled. Many sources say that native support for floppies was removed from all Mac OSs after 10.8. But you're saying it works just fine in 10.12. Interesting.

 

[Cory Cooper]

No worries.

I hadn't heard that. In fact, I connected the same LaCie drive to a 2016 MacBook Pro running macOS Mojave 10.14.2, via an Apple USB-C to USB Adapter, and it mounts and works fine there as well.



C

 

[DanL]

Well, see this ...

http://lowendmac.com/2016/floppy-disk-compatibility-and-incompatibility-in-the-mac-world/

But I now understand that it is 400K and maybe 800K floppies that aren't supported in the new operating systems. I'm not near them now, but mine may be those.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Interesting read...thanks.

I still have 3.5" floppy disks dating all the way back to the Mac 128K, and even some 5.25" from an old Apple IIe.

Yeah, it doesn't seems to like the older floppies - pre-HD 1.44 MB. But, I have older Macs that will read them.

C