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by max1984_2 1907 days ago
USB floppy disk drives are only any good at reading and writing 1.44mb disks. If you need a 720k disk for something like an Amiga/Atari ST they don't work IME (some people have claimed otherwise but I've never had any luck).

I keep an old Core Quad machine with a real floppy disk controller on it just for this reason. Windows XP / XP 64 and Linux are the only things that write to these drives properly (IIRC Windows versions after Vista don't control the floppy controller directly). I do have better options now for transferring files to these old machines.

1 comments

https://www.amazon.it/gp/aw/d/B01J1RAHYQ/ref=ppx_yo_mob_b_in...

I bought that a couple of years ago, it supports both dd and hd floppies.

The capacity isn't the problem. It is the direct write access. If it is USB it tends not to have direct hardware access and it won't work no PC format disk e.g. the ADF Amiga format.

If I use a real floppy disk controller + Linux can write to those disks in the correct format. It works. I am not an expert in how any of this works though. What I have at the moment is sufficient.

I am sure people have had luck with USB drives. I have not.

Amiga disks can't be read by PC floppy controllers whether they're USB or not (barring the 2 drive hack seen here before) because they write a whole track at once and pc floppy controllers can't be programmed to understand their sector headers.

If you want to read/write Amiga disks with a PC you need a greaseweasel or a Kryoflux

Just tried it. It appears I am using cross-dos. I've still never had any luck with USB drives though (just tried a USB floppy I have as well).