Adafruit’s Exciting New Floppy Disk Drive Solution

Imagine for a moment that you want to copy some data onto a 3.5” floppy disk. Maybe that’s some software for a vintage computer or maybe the company you work for still uses ancient systems and you need to import new data. How would you do that? It has been many years since motherboard manufacturers even bothered including floppy disk drive (FDD) controllers and connections. USB floppy drives exist, but they’re often unreliable and compatibility is far from consistent. That’s why Adafruit is developing an exciting new solution for floppy disk drive use.

Adafruit’s engineers seem to be struggling to come up with terminology to describe this device, because it can actually perform a few different functions. At a fundamental level, it acts as an adapter between a “standard” FDD (more on that in a moment) and a modern PC. That lets users back up the data on floppy disks for archives and also write new data to floppy disks. This device can also back up floppy disk data to an SD card without bringing a computer into the mix at all.

Those functions are very useful to those of us involved in retrocomputing. Floppy disks are notorious for being very susceptible to data corruption, so archiving their contents onto more robust media can — quite literally — prevent the complete loss of potentially irreplaceable information. Writing data is less dramatic, but arguably more beneficial when tinkering with old computers.

This device’s PCB has a 5V/12V Molex connector, a 34-pin IDC connector, and a 26-pin FPC connector. Between those, users should be able to connect just about any 3.5” FDD, most 5.25” FDDs, and maybe even some 8” FDDs. Adafruit’s engineers are even considering adding a Disk ][ connector for the Apple crowd—something that I’d love to have when working with my Apple ][c.

A Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller interfaces with the FDD to read and write data. The PCB contains an optional SD card slot for computer-free backups and a 1.3” color TFT screen for status information. The power supply is 12V and there is a buck converter to bring that down to 5V for that power rail. If 12V isn’t necessary, power can come entirely from the USB-C port.

But before you get too excited, you should know that this is just a prototype at the moment. If you want Adafruit to start selling their floppy adapter/archiver thing, you should let them know that you’re interested by commenting on their YouTube video or blog post.