External 5.25" Floppy Drives?

R2.0 writes "Are there any external 5.25" FD's out there? My wife and I have a number of old 5.25" floppies with all sorts of interesting stuff from school - she had a Kaypro, and Lehigh had just gotten hundreds of Zenith PC's. In the interest of archival record keeping (Ok, I'm a packrat), I'd like to get this stuff off the old floppies and onto my HD, and then maybe onto CD-R. Problem: I'm out of 5.25" bays in my Dell, so I can't just put in one of those handy combo 3.5"/5.25" drives. And I can't just pop the CD player out, pop in an old drive, and do everything in one batch - I need to be able to do this a couple of disks at a time, between changing diapers, etc. Can anyone suggest an external solution to my problem? Parallel, serial, or USB; homebrewed or purchased." Ah, the endless problem of preserving data from old media. Due to the lack of use that 5.25" drives have had in the past 10 years, this might be a very hard-to-find item. Is anyone making 5.25" drives anymore?

Comments

Is the data still there?

[Molina the Bofh]

There are good chances your data has been corrupted and your quest is merelly a waste of time. Magnetic media will only last a few years. There's no way to tell the exact life expectancy of the media, as it depends, among others, on the conditions if was stored. Here's how to store. Temperature should be below 70F and humidity below 70% if you wanted to preserve data for a long time. According to this, the floppy disks should last from 5 to 10 years.

easy

[spacefrog]

First, get a powered 5.25 drive box. So many of these were used for external SCSI CDROM drives, that they can be had for almost nothing. A quick ebay search turned up this beut, which you can "buy now" for $15.00

Acquire your floppy drive. Once again, ebay makes this easy.

Remove the CDROM drive and rear SCSI centronics connector from the drive box. Mount the floppy drive in place of the CDROM. Discard CDROM.

Remove slot cover from PC. Run floppy data cable out the gaping hole and through the gaping hole in the back of the drivebox.

Done

Almost all 5.25" drives use a card-edge connector. No floppy cables seem to have these anymore. The easiest way to get the adapter is usually to buy a 3.5" floppy drive "mounting kit" most of which still include the little adapter.

You will probably have cable-length issues if you want to leave your internal floppy connected at the same time. You can solve this by having a custom cable made, finding an extension cable, or buying a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive (once again, ebay has several) and just leaving the internal drive disconnected (or remove it) for now. Most of the combo drives take an IDC header (as opposed to card-edge), so you won't have to find an adapter or old floppy cable, either.

This entire adventure will end up costing you roughly $30 and some time. If you are competent with a screwdriver, I would estimate 60 minutes from start to finish once you have all the pieces.

Have fun.