Floppy Disk Reader, 3.5 inch External Floppy Disk Drive with USB Type-C, Portable FDD Floppy Disk Drive for Laptop PC Windows 11/10/8/7/2000/XP

I used this device, connected to my surface pro. I had an old floppy disc, and I was so glad to get the photos transferred from such old technology to saved on my new device. And it was easy to! Not to mention it cost next to nothing. It is formatting as it goes over and takes very little power. It’s easy to function- and takes very little time to power up. I’m impressed !

Anyone who has been involved with computers long enough (as I have) will know that there was a time when floppy diskettes were "THE" technology. If you wanted to carry files somewhere, you grabbed a floppy, copied them...waited for the s-l-o-w copy times and hoped you wouldn't exceed the size limit of 1.44 MB. Those were the days.They were the days...way back in the early 1990's, which means at this point, because they were made with a magnetic film similar to cassette tapes, they are starting to deteriorate. Sony ceased production of 3.5" floppies in 2011, and so any people who still have important memories/pictures/documents (they must be really, really tiny) will need to be able to read these diskettes. How is this going to be done since floppy disk drives stopped appearing on mail order PCs?By purchasing a USB based floppy disk drive from Wbacon, the oddly named product of this review.While the name may be odd, and mouth watering at the same time (mmhhh bacon), the device is a really well made, solidly built, sleek looking unit. It measures about 3/4" high, and 5 1/2" long, so it won't take up much desk space.But the really important part is, how does it function? If you are the proud owner of a Mac, it doesn't, or won't. Jobs couldn't wait to get rid of floppy drives. But they stayed around on PC's with Windows. I tested this unit on Windows 10, but I'm pretty sure it would test well on most Windows versions dating back to Windows 7, and perhaps even earlier. If the system has USB, it will most likely be recognized and work. And the beautiful part, NO DRIVERS NEEDED! Yes, there was a time when users had to download drivers, perhaps even mess around with .ini files to get hardware to work.Not the Wbacon, which is instantly recognized. The cable has both a USB 2.0 A type plug and a USB C type plug in case you are out of USB A ports. I tried both plugs, and Windows 10 easily recognized the drive. Copy speeds were great, but are inherently limited by the slow nature of the magnetic circle spinning around inside the diskette shell. The USB C plug doesn't improve the speed since USB 2 has plenty of speed to handle a floppy. Either way, the device is powered via the USB connection, and so nothing else is needed.If you have an old collection of 3.5" floppy drives, NOW is the time to start backing them up to your drive and then the cloud before they disintegrate and start losing data. And why not start with Wbacon. It is one of the cheaper drives out there, and as I say, it's well made and sharp looking!

not much documentation with the disk drive. Plug it in and it will read the label on the disk, but until you do some detective work, you will not fine any files listed on a file explorer screen

This USB External 1.44MB Diskette Drive works on both my Windows 10 Version 22H2 Build (Lenovo P410) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Lenovo P620) workstations out of the box without any driver updates. In Widows 10, the uploaded 8 images show the procedure to use the diskette drive. Open "Control Panel", then "Hardware and Sound" and finally click "Devices and Printers" icon (Better copy this "Devices and Printers" icon into your desktop so you just have to click it the next time - Right click the "Devices and Printers" icon and select "Create shortcut"). Figure 1 illustrates to show the "Properties" of the USB External dikette drive. Figure 2 illustrates how to show the file contents of the 1.44MB diskette mounted on the device. Figure 3 shows the contents list of the 1.44MB diskette drive after clicking the "Floppy Disk Drive (A:)" selection in Figure 2. In Figure 4, right Click to launch the Windows File Manager Menu to perform copy of all the contents of the diskette drive and wait for the Flie Manager menu to display (this took long to render as the files are being prepared for the Windows File Manager). Figure 5 finally showed the Windows File Manager menu and select the "Copy" option. Figure 6 shows to right click on the target hard disk sub-directory window to paste the diskette files to copy. Figure 7 shows the copied files in the target hard disk drive sub-directory. The last Figure 8 shows how to copy the files using MS-DOS command window to the target hard disk sub-directory and in this case, I intentionally use a bad 1.44MB diskette to show that the USB diskette drive can detect bad or unreadable sectors of the files being copied and the bad files will be skipped. Overall, this is a very good external USB 1.44 MB Disktte drive, one must be proficient in Windows 10 and MS-DOS commands to use the device proficiently. One last tip, if the 1.44MB diskette has bad sectors and one is using the GUI Windows 10 File Manager, the USB diskette device takes a long time to recognize the files and it behaves like a program loop is occurring, therefore, one has to cancel the File Manager window and after cancellation, just use MS-DOS command window to copy the contents as the MS-DOS command feature detects corrupted sectors of the diskette files as shown in Figure 8.

First use went well - plug & play, no driver to download, correctly read a dozen or so 'floppy' discs. Tried it again a few weeks later - it can't be recognized on any of my computers. On the third machine it didn't even power on. Just proves you can't always trust reviews.

After my parents passed away, we had to sort through their belongings, and lo and behold—we unearthed a plethora of floppy disks, seemingly from 1905 (okay, maybe not that old, but close enough). My sister said, “Just throw them away!” But I had a nagging feeling—what if there was something important on them?Enter this floppy disk hard drive. It was super easy to set up and connected to my laptop right away. I eagerly started going through the disks, hoping to uncover family secrets, lost documents, maybe even a treasure map.Instead, I found… naughty photos. Lots of them. More than I ever wanted to see. Let’s just say some things are better left in the past.That said, if any of my friends happen to stumble upon ancient floppy disks from 1905, I’d be more than happy to lend them this device. But I strongly recommend proceeding with caution.

Not compatible