[reaperducer]

I've never understood why retro computer enthusiasts go through such effort to replace their floppy drives with CF cards, when Sony had a solution almost 25 years ago.

My DSC-30 came with a metal floppy disk that has no moving parts. But you could insert a Memory Stick into it, and then stick it in any 3.5" floppy drive and read the stick as FAT.

Every time I see someone on the VCF forums struggling with the latest floppy drive replacement board I wonder what ever happened to that technology.

[an-unknown]

Simple: a real 3.5" floppy disk drive has moving parts and various things that age and eventually break. For example I have an old device with a broken floppy disk drive which can't even read a real floppy anymore. With the metal floppy "emulator disk" you mentioned, the FDD itself still has to be fully functional in order to read this "emulator disk".

A floppy emulator board which reads SD/CF cards or USB sticks doesn't have that problem at all since it's purely solid state electronics and directly connected to the electronic interface of the FDD instead of the real FDD, and usually you can put thousands of floppy disk images onto such a memory card/stick and select which disk image is to be put into the emulated floppy disk drive ⇒ there is simply no need for the "emulator disk" technology you mentioned anymore.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Those floppy disk emulators require special drivers to prevent the drive head moving off the transducer. It isn't worth the hassle to get them working on non-PCs.

[JPLeRouzic]

> "metal floppy disk"

That's an interesting combination of words!