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External 3.5 disk drive recommendation?

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I can find very inexpensive 3.5" USB floppy disk drives on Amazon. I'm wondering if these low prices means poor quality. Does anyone have a recommendation?

asked by Matt Gorzalski on 23 Sep 2014 · 763 views

It's not clear from your question. Are you asking about 3.5" floppy disk drives (1.4mb) or 3.5" hard disk drives (1tb and larger)?

— nkrabben, 24 Sep 2014
Sorry about that. I was talking about 3.5 floppy disk drives to read obsolete media.

— Matt Gorzalski, 24 Sep 2014

2 answers

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I have found a few drives are hit and miss. Some name branded drives from Dell or Sony work well, but every so often the off brand drive can read a disk the others could not. I always test a drive a few times with a disk that is not critical before putting production disks through the drive.

answered by thorsted on 19 May 2015

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I recently bought one of these:

http://www.conrad.com/ce/en/product/1170561/35-89-cm-disk-drive-Basetech-Refurbished-USB-20?ref=searchDetail

This is a refurbished drive (i.e. they took an old drive, cleaned it, added a USB connector and then put it in an enclosure).

First impression after limited testing is good. My Linux Mint machine even recognised it right away (no drivers or special software needed), which surprised me. It's really cheap as well.

On a side note, from what I understand some of the more 'modern' 3.5" floppy drives only support High Density (HD, 1.44 MB) floppies and can't read Double Density (DD, 720 KB) disks. So this may be something to watch out for (specs aren't always clear about this; my cheapo Basetech is able to read DD disks, BTW).

answered by johanvanderknijff on 26 Aug 2015