Erica Walker <> wrote:
> Hi guys
> I am wanting to get an external USB floppy drive for my eMac - would
> any USB external drive work for it, or does it need a specific Mac
> kind?
As far as I know, any 3.5" USB floppy should be OK, as long as it
doesn't require proprietary drivers, but I've only seen people using
drives advertised for use with a Mac (or styled after the original iMac,
at least visually implying compatibility).
All USB floppy drives support 720K and 1440K formats: double sided,
double or high density, using MFM coding. The Mac supported these
formats from about 1988 with the introduction of the "Superdrive" with
the Mac IIx (and as an upgrade for the Mac SE and Mac II). The file
system used on Mac-specific floppies in these formats was HFS, but the
Mac also had software to read/write floppies using the FAT (MS-DOS) file
system and the same physical format.
There are no USB floppy drives which support the older Mac-specific 400K
and 800K formats: single sided or double sided, double density, using
GCR coding and the file system was MFS (400K) or HFS (800K). These disks
can only be accessed using older Macs with a built-in floppy drive
running Mac OS 9.x or earlier (400K requires Mac OS 7.x or earlier), and
only worked reliably with 1980s and early 1990s Mac models that had a
Sony drive mechanism (characterised by its motorised disk insertion
action, as distinct from later models which required manually pushing
the disk into the drive).
--
David Empson
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