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

"External" drive

[psergiu]

- Get an internal 5" drive
- get a really long floppy cable (up to 0.75m is ok) (ar extend/build one yourself - 34 wires)
- get 2 molex power connectors (one male on female) and 4 wires and build an "power extender"
- remove an ISA/PCI cover plate
- pull the floppy and power cable trough there
- connect to the drive outside the case
- use duct dape as you see fit.
- do not use near strong EM fields.