This acts as a controller that attaches to a conventional PC floppy disk drive (which does not have internal controller electronics like a modern hard drive).
It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge
For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are especially broken in nearly all modern OSes.
I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.
Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.
If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and jazip.
With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.
I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.
I did get a USB floppy drive a few years ago... don't even know for sure if/where I have it as I never actually used it... got it just in case I needed to get some data off for friends/family, but that use case never presented itself... I'd moved off of all floppy media by 2001.
It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.
The standard to which you're referring, UFI, supports only 3 media types, all of which are 3.5". It is no use for 5.25" disks. The broader Mass Storage Class is also no use because the built-in OS drivers for MSC assume that the device has a single media type or the hardware can auto-detect the media type. We use a vendor-specific command set so the host can specify parameters to read a variety of formats, including non-PC formats.
I suspect the USB FDD standard does not support telling the device what type of disk is inserted. This supports far more than the IBM compatible disks that can be determined just from the notches.
The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller.
According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.
I remember our first computer (a 386SX16/20) which my Dad bought sometime around 1989/1990, started out with two 5.25 inch floppy drives – a 1.2MB drive and a 360KB drive, so we could write 360KB disks without corrupting them. (My Dad thought this was important, I guess it was somewhat back then.)
Soon he decided we needed a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well. But he didn't want to give up having both the 1.2MB and 360KB 5.25 inch drives. The existing floppy controller only supported 2 floppy drives, so he went and bought a new one which supported four floppy drives. The chassis had enough drive bays to fit all three floppies and a 40MB hard disk. We had to make some changes to CONFIG.SYS (maybe an installable device driver??) since BIOS/DOS couldn't detect more than 2 floppy drives by default.
My first computer was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work. A 12.5MHz 286. It also had two 5.25" drives in that configuration, but never thought why. Eventually installed a 1.44MB drive in place of the single density drive.
