
Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk - adamnemecek
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a19616/modified-floppy-disk-and-drive-uses-sd-cards/
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dcw303
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would
actually be _more_ functional that current tech.

It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it
are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and
CD-ROMs.

~~~
josteink
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would
> actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD
> cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions.

To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There
was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine
to commit data. The data was simply already committed so there was no need to
have any additional layers of security.

The difference between then and now is that new computers have enormous
amounts of memory and use it to provide write-back caching. This means the OS
can tell applications that data is committed when it's not. This is an OS
level decision which is done for performance and has nothing to do with the
physical eject-buttons on your devices.

You may call this a small nit, but I think it's an important one. The eject-
button on old machines would suffer the exact same problems if it used an OS
which offered write-back cache.

You could say old _Macs_ didn't have this problem, which is true. But it
didn't have an eject-button. It relied on the OS doing that. And then instead
you had the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their
machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it (or that users didn't
realize they had to drag the disk-icon to _trash_ ).

~~~
ttctciyf
> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their
> machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it

My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of
early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me
alone with (and permission to use) her Mac.

I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but
found a floppy that looked something like a game. It wasn't, and I went to hit
the ... wait, there's no eject button?

After a fruitless few minutes during which I failed to notice the eject key on
the keyboard (of all places!) I eventually opted for tweezers, and gently
teased the floppy out of the drive.

Imagine my surprise when I restarted the Mac to find it was unable to start,
having apparently completely forgotten about it's own HD! The thing had to go
back for servicing before it would even boot properly, iirc.

My reputation as the house's resident computer expert was severely impacted,
needless to say.

~~~
soylentcola
One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was
the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when
some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had
no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting
or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole.

Still, seeing how many people in my office will just pull USB flash drives
without ejecting them I almost see the appeal now.

~~~
shdon
That latter bit is actually so common that Windows was changed to accommodate
it, as Raymond Chen wrote at
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=41483)

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alblue
Although this is a fun idea, it's just putting an SD card into a 3.5" floppy
disk case and then wiring up the read/write head with contacts to make it
appear like an insertion of a normal mass storage SD card.

A more accurate title would be "putting an SD card in a floppy disk case"

~~~
digi_owl
Makes me ponder a 3.5" SD reader with a eject button though.

~~~
delinka
Or maybe a 3.5" SD _card_ filled with SD technology ... I wonder how much
storage that would be.

~~~
digi_owl
On that note, while idly looking into SD readers for the 3.5" bay, i came
across one that could dock a 2.5" SATA drive.

[http://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail...](http://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&no=181&type=Card%20Reader/Hub&type_sub=Card%20Reader&model=AK-
ICR-10)

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AgentME
Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in
unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do
systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver
support I guess, which takes some fun away.

~~~
Sanddancer
They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you
reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc
-- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk
formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as
far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to
two megs, and others not able to handle much more than 1.44mb.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format)

~~~
fsiefken
Exactly, it reminds me of the time when I formatted a HD 3.5" floppy to 2M
with the aforementioned excellent 2M3.0 tool by Ciriaco García de Celis
(Facultad de Ciencias de Valladolid: Grupo Universitario de Informatica). It
provided 500 Kb of more available data beyond the 1.44M (more then fdformat).
From a 2M dos bootdisk I launched a stripped version of win3.1, extracted the
WIN3.UC2 archive to a ramdrive of 6M or so and launched it. In this way I
could edit my assignments with wysywig WRITE.EXE instead of the dos based WP51
on the library computers. People were wondering how I could have windows
running as it wasn't installed. So nowaydays we have 100000M instead of 2M in
a smaller package.

~~~
jmiserez
> HD 3.5" floppy

It's slightly amusing to me that floppy disks were once called "HD", even
though the abbreviation stood for high density rather than high definition.

~~~
ashmud
Before those, you had double density "DD" disks -- and extended density "ED"
disks after that. With the sleeve encased floppies you could even throw in
single-sided and double-sided variants. Growing up, we had a lot of 1200KB
5-1/4 disks. IIRC, they were enough cheaper than 1440KB 3-1/2 disks for close
to the same storage.

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pvdebbe
I would like to see the 3.5" floppy do a comeback, for instance as a 1TB+
flash drive. It is large enough that you can comfortably handle it physically
and label it, maybe it could be a small throwback to the age of floppies and
zip drives.

~~~
ant6n
And nowadays the write back buffer could be on the device itself, and as you
hit the 'eject' button it could use the power from a small capacitor to commit
it to the disk. Thus no separate 'eject' in the operating system - pop it out
and go.

They could replace Blu Ray with this new format, so all those sci-movies in
the 80ies where there are films on floppys - those will turn out to be right.

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pmarin
Sprite TM did the same thing several years ago:

[http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=3](http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=3)

[https://youtu.be/9pJHqaF23B8](https://youtu.be/9pJHqaF23B8)

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esaym
Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in
unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware
hobbyist video [https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ](https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ)

~~~
OneOneOneOne
That would be about 80E3 floppys. Assuming a transfer rate of 500kbyte/second
the peak data rate for the array would be 40E9 byte/second!

~~~
esaym
Yes, that is what I wanting to see. Something impressive :)

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addled
I was struck by a talk by Kirk Knoernschild in 2013 where he pointed out that
there is now a generation of users who don't know what a floppy disk is... Yet
it is still the "save" icon in nearly every application.

~~~
reconbot
"What's a pay phone?" is a phrase you'll hear from time to time too.

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sdoering
Damn.

It would have never occurred to me, to hack something like this together. I
really love it when someone comes up with creative ideas to reuse old stuff
and mixing in some new things as well.

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agumonkey
Would love to see a whole lot more of repurposed, upgraded old tech. VHS,
audio tapes, you name it. My latest thrill is the pico8 project. Low res, 8bit
games but with the extra compute power of today, it yields funny results.

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anewhnaccount
Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superfloppy)
?

~~~
brodie78382
I used to have a LS120 SuperDisk drive in my computer. I really liked the idea
but it was useless because no one else had them. I think I still have the
drive and several disks stashed away somewhere.

~~~
voidz
Hey, I'm the other guy who had one, pleased to meet you after all those years!
_cackles_

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bradley_long
Although this is not a useful "innovation", I had fun while watching it.

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rodiger
where/when can I buy this

~~~
lawpoop
[http://www.ebay.com/itm/FLASHPATH-ADAPTER-FLOPPY-DISK-
ADAPTE...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/FLASHPATH-ADAPTER-FLOPPY-DISK-ADAPTER-FOR-
SMARTMEDIA-NOS-NIB-/201380015519?hash=item2ee32f2d9f:g:apsAAOSw-vlVkfax)

