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?
128 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadUsually, 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.
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.
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
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.
When was this? 1997.
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.
On the contrary, I (40yo) own some 3.5 floppies (a couple of old big box pc games).
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.
So, yes, if you want to format your 1.44MB capable 3.5 inch disks as 1.25MB you can. But still not the 5.25 inch disks the OP is requesting.
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.
The power cables were typically a different connector as well.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.autozone.com/lighters/universal-cigarette-lighte...
I remember repairing discs by swapping to the shell of a new one when something like the mini spring broke.
I think the Zip used more of a brown plastic type of disk. The loading was more of a low chunck-chunck sound.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
2: The technical reason why these disks could have higher density was due to being able to use optical elements as a servo-mechanism, rather than just using dead-reckoning like a floppy would. This required the disk to be printed with marks that had high contrast in the infrared range.
I remember that time as particularly annoying. It was a God send to see usb sticks become mainstream, and since everyone had mp3 players on them it meant that you were always carrying a USB stick with you (except for the poor souls that had ipods, who couldn't treat the storage as a folder for random files and had to use iTunes instead ).
Here's an apple support doc showing how:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...
I ended up taking the notebook (a Dell Latitude with 810MB of hard disk) to a friends where we managed to install from a network mounted CD via the parallel port IIRC.
I tried to short-circuit that long-winded installation by putting the last 50 or so on to a QIC tape-cassette. Most of the time that worked, sometimes it didn't.
I have not so great memories of constantly reinstalling windows via floppy.
Swapping disks getS old quick
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.
My dad had an IBM 286 clone, which is the oldest computer I can remember using (Captain Comic!). That had both 5¼" 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 5¼" 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....
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.
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.
Ah, technical correctness, the best sort of correctness.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.