Reading floppy disks? GOTTA GO FAST!

the three and a half inch floppy disk has massive cultural cachet and for good reason it was a major form of data storage for conservatively 25 years and it was a hands-on format people saw day in day out during all the formative years of what we now know as personal computing and what's remarkable about that is that while the floppy disk did actually evolve considerably during its lifespan it never seemed to get any faster these were originally a sony product they called them the microfloppy and they first came out in about 1982 and it was just sony at first putting it in some weird devices they made for instance the smc 70 which is a z80 and cpm based video titler processor kind of contraption i actually have one of these and i would love to do a video about it when i feel competent to do so but i've actually put two thousands era three and a half inch discs in it and they read successfully now in their native format those original drives only stored about 160 kilobytes well okay i did read that in a couple places online but when i tried to corroborate it i couldn't so i think the 360k drives are the smallest ones that ever actually got made but let's move on but things got bigger rapidly when apple started putting floppy drives in the original macintosh they stored 400k and later 800k ibm in the mid 80s started putting 360k drives in their machines later 720k and while the entire market eventually adopted the 1.44 meg standard that we now consider the definitive floppy disk ibm actually continued right past that and made a 2.88 meg floppy drive although it didn't really get much uptick all of this happened with virtually no changes to the medium like i'm sure they altered the magnetic formulation and stuff but those ibm 2.8 meg drives could read all the way back to the first 360k discs that ibm put out and in fact i've put those original 1982 160k discs in a modern floppy drive and i was able to image them you can't read those early mac disks on a pc because they changed the modulation of the magnetic signal but otherwise the discs themselves are the same physically so to restate my point the three and a half inch disc went through massive changes in its lifespan and grew in capacity by over 10 times but as far as i know it still stayed dog slow surely they must have improved the speed since the original 160k ones but the point is that in 1994 they were unpleasantly slow and by 2004 when we were still using floppies heavily they were agonizing of course this is largely moot nowadays since very few of us use floppy disks regularly i mean there's retro computing but you know you don't do that much of it and you don't really care that it's loading slowly it's part of the experience but it would be nice if the drives that bend faster and if you're doing disc preservation archiving floppies before they turn into binary dust oh boy you only gotta do a little bit of that before you start wishing there was a quicker way to do it i do want to take a moment to say however that nothing in this video should be taken as advice for data preservation you should talk to the experts about that the people who do this day in day out they know a lot more than me please do not run out and buy any of the things that i show you in this video but anyway from any perspective it's strange that in the 2000s we were using drives that were no faster at least not perceivably so than the ones we'd had possibly decades earlier i mean sure we were stuck with the floppy format we couldn't break backwards compatibility but you would think with the improvements in technology that someone would have developed a drive that could at least read disks more quickly and they did high-speed floppy drives did in fact exist i don't think a ton of people had them although everyone who did is going to comment hi i see you but they were out there and you can actually still get them for the time being i have a small variety here that are a little more interesting than i made this sound and i just figured i'd show you what some of the other options were so let's get started to begin we need a baseline so i started with my old standby this dell drive i swear by these things they're godsends although you wouldn't know it to look at one they don't look like much they look like internal components for a laptop you don't own which is true that's exactly what they are this drive is meant to go with this laptop right here now if you don't recall this era of laptops it's like this power users wanted to have a cd-rom and a floppy drive sometimes and sometimes even a secondary hard drive but laptops rarely had room for all those things at once so what manufacturers did is they put a hot swap bay in the side of the machine where you could install any one of those things on the fly in some cases there was even wilder stuff like spare batteries you could put in the bay it was a wild time to be alive now this particular floppy drive was designed for the modular bay uh in a mid-2000s dell latitude like this d620 here this currently has a cd burner in it but all you do is just press this latch yank it out and then take this guy slot it in and there you go you can actually do this while the machine is running and it'll just pop right up in my computer it's great fun now why am i telling you about this well this specific drive is very special all modular drives for laptops connect to the machine with these proprietary plugs like the one you see here however dell did something very odd with this specific drive they also put a usb port on the side this one is not proprietary you can plug this into any machine with a usb port windows mac linux boss whatever and it'll just work now there are lots of usb floppy drives on the market but my favorite thing about this one is you can get fresh high quality ones a lot of used usb floppy drives are well they're used you don't know where they've been and you don't know if they were ever any good but since these were intended for business class machines they are pretty good quality and since they were intended as spare parts there are still stacks of them in warehouses all over the country probably all over the world so you can often find lots of used ones in the shrink wrap on ebay i have like six or seven of these and i put some info on how to find one in the description now i use one of these on my windows 10 machine at home uh and it's very reliable uh and that's what we're gonna do here we're not actually gonna use the d620 it's not the best health we're gonna use the e6420 which in addition uh to being the weed number is also one of my favorite machines this one actually is one of the latest machines that ever had a modular bay although sadly it won't take this drive directly so we're just going to hook it up with usb like any other machine this just plugs in with an ordinary mini not micro usb and you'll see in this cutaway b-roll that shows up in my computer just like any other floppy drive so how do we benchmark this uh well i'm not very good at that sort of thing and this also isn't project farm so i'm not gonna just drop 30 minutes of numbers on you i'm not rigorous enough to do what that guy does anyway i'm just going to talk about these drives and show you some very basic real world tests that i did that i think are accurate first i found a 1.38 meg pdf which is almost the size of a formatted floppy disk and i just copied that onto the disk with windows explorer and then copied it back off while timing it with the atrocious windows stopwatch now that could be inaccurate because windows caches the contents of disks so if you're not careful that can skew your results but i've found that if you take the disk out and then refresh so windows realizes there's no disk in the drive then put it back in that will invalidate the disk cache and you'll get reliable results for my second test i did the other thing that i do with floppy disks i used win image to create a bit for bit image of the whole disk now since this should access the disk raw that should bypass any optimizations or caching and it should give us a realistic idea how fast the drive actually is but i don't know if it always writes the full disk or only the used portion so i did all my math assuming that it only writes 1.38 megs of data so all my numbers might be a little bit low however because the windows stop watch is so bad and you can't really tell when the drive starts and stops reading the timing is probably off in the other direction so these are all just ballpark figures but the numbers i got with both methods seem to agree with each other and they all lined up with some estimates i found online so i think these tests are close enough to the truth so let's try and get our baseline by checking the read speed on this dell drive so a full read takes about 43 seconds doing the math that's about 32 kilobytes per second which is close enough to what some people on forums say is typical floppy drive speed writing the data back to the disk seems to take the same amount of time now i was ready to call this the standard floppy drive speed the 1x that we can compare everything else to however i had this toshiba drive laying around and i just decided you know i should check it out as well to see if there's a variance in quality and the results were not what i expected the toshiba actually ended up significantly slower on my first tests which i didn't record it took 55 seconds to read a disk which is around 25 kilobytes per second but when i tested again with the camera rolling every test came up 65 seconds which is closer to 22 kilobytes per second now if the dell here was my baseline if this was the one x drive then that would make this a three quarter x or even a half x drive but i then went and tested the internal drive in the edge and that one came up 55 seconds when i first tested it and when i tried again on camera i got 51 which i think must be because i timed it with my phone or something anyway on average both this and the edge seem about 5 kilobytes per second slower than the del drive now 5kb may seem minor but at the speeds we're talking about it's a big deal in 1998 people would have killed for an extra five kilobytes per second of internet bandwidth and in this case it means it takes about 10 additional seconds to read or write a whole disk so that's a big difference the question is is the toshiba slow or is the dell fast well i don't have a stack of drives to test with so i'm just going to guess since i'm pretty sure the dell is newer than the others i'm going to guess that the other two are actually the standard speed that there are one x or just that there's a range and the dell is further towards the high end of the curve that's dope because it means that for the last you know 10 years i've been using these things i've been buying one and a quarter speed drives yet another reason to love them i guess in any case let's pin our baseline at 25 kilobytes per second let's call that 1x and now let's look at a drive that goes faster than that this is a sony 2x usb floppy drive the model number's in the description and you'll need that because it doesn't say 2x anywhere on it not on the top or the front not even on the label on the bottom you have to look up the model number to find out that it's actually anything special although it is the heaviest usb floppy i've ever owned which is a reassuring let's see how it performs though so this drive reads the whole disc in about 25 seconds which is about 56 kilobytes per second uh so if 25 is our baseline then that means this is actually a little faster than 2x my write tests came up at 22 to 23 seconds which is very fast but i really don't trust my stopwatch especially on the right tests so i'm going to just ballpark this and say that the drive reads and writes at a little over 2x and so there you have it there are double speed floppy drives and this is one of them there's no frills no special drivers doesn't even say what it is it's just a floppy drive that's twice as fast as the normal ones it seems like a nice upgrade if you can get one there's actually a bunch of 2x floppy drives on ebay at the moment this one and some other model numbers i put in the description you can look up so they must have sold a decent number of these which is why it's so peculiar that i don't remember ever seeing one when i was working in electronics recycling on the other hand maybe i did and i just didn't recognize it because they don't they don't say 2x anywhere on it none of the vendors seem to feel the need to point that out which is weird for the pictures i've seen some of the sony drives did have a big 2x on top but other ones don't and i think this one might be missing some sort of trim piece so maybe that's what's going on but certainly a lot of these don't seem to mention it's really weird anyway where do we go from here well if you look for 3x floppy drives i don't think you'll find one i thought i had seen one before but i can't find it now so i must have imagined it now at the extreme end of things there was a 10x drive called the fastcash x10 unfortunately nobody seems to have one of those they supposedly did enter production in the late 90s i've seen a picture of one but i've never met anybody who had one bummer fun fact about it though on wikipedia there's a pull quote from the designer of the drive just saying that he never understood why floppy drives never got any faster yeah weird right so i don't have either of those but fortunately this is where we get into the weird stuff see the first high-speed floppy drive i ever saw the one that got me thinking about this to begin with wasn't actually a floppy drive it was a camera this one right here in fact this is a sony mavica fd200 and if you look right here on the top i'll put in a little b-roll close-up of that it says quick access fd drive 4x you're probably familiar with the mavica line sony's digital cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks this one is much like many of the others except that the floppy mechanism is ostensibly four times the speed of an ordinary floppy drive now this seemed like overkill to me until i did the math the first mavicas were made around 1997 and uh well i don't have one of those at the moment a manual i found for one suggests that the pictures they took were between 40 and 70 kilobytes each writing those to disk at one x would take about two to three seconds per picture which is not too bad but the fd 200 here made many years later in 2002 can take pictures up to 300 kilobytes and at 1x that would take over 12 seconds to write out which is completely unacceptable however put in a 4x drive and that gets you back down to 2 to 3 seconds per file so you can see it was kind of necessary to develop a high speed floppy drive if sony was going to keep the mavica relevant although why they were still doing that in 2002 i'm not really sure now this was actually more common than i had realized i have two other mavacas in my collection right now and i never really looked too close to them but this one actually says quick access fd2x right on it i just never noticed and this one here the fd73 doesn't say it anywhere it says it right there on the front i just missed it right there right there i looked i looked all over this when i was writing the script anyway it seems likely to me that a lot of mavicas probably had two speed or faster floppy drives but i don't know how many of them had four speed all that being equal however if you're not interested in taking crappy old digital photos then why do you even care about any of this well the fd200 is very special among the mavicas see most of these expect you to take pictures and then take the disc out and put it in your pc's floppy drive to read it this one however having come out as late as it did actually has a usb port now sony could have required a special driver and software that only let you manage your photos but fortunately they didn't choose violence this time this thing shows up as a normal mass storage device so you just plug it in it pops up an explorer and you can simply drag your photos right off of it and sure that's what it's for but it also lets you drag stuff onto it and it doesn't care what it is so this just functions as a generic usb floppy drive but one that runs at 4x now a footnote i was going to tell you again not to try to archive disks with this but also that this one won't work for it anyway because when i try to get win image to talk to it it just refuses like it recognizes it but then i hit read and it just doesn't do anything now i was assuming this is because it's not actually a usb floppy drive it shows up as a generic mass storage device which is weird and i thought that was just confusing wind image until i tried to shoot demonstration video of that today and it just worked on this specific laptop it works not on my home machine not on my studio workstation or anything else i've tried but on this machine wind image will talk to it so dazed and confused i carried on and ran my tests anyway the mavic is certainly a fast drive it copies the disk in about 18 seconds for an effective speed of about 78 kilobytes per second now that makes it only a little faster than 3x which is strange the sony 2x drive really was 2x so why would this not be four now when i was initially testing this without the cameras rolling i was getting 100 kilobytes per second but now i can't replicate that so either i timed it differently or maybe my disc is wearing out i don't know in any case for the purpose of downloading your vacation photos 3x is still pretty impressive think about this if you went on vacation with the camera set to normal resolution so it's saving 50 kilobyte files instead of the massive 300 kilobyte ones when you got home you could empty out all the disks you brought with you at a rate of nearly a hundred photos a minute which is pretty impressive for floppy disks i mean flash based cameras were probably better in every way but this is still pretty impressive now i can't test write speeds properly because even on this machine when image chokes when i try to write to it it just pops up these bizarre crc errors even though the disk isn't even spinning but i did test just copying a file onto it with explorer several times and i got similar figures to the read tests so it seems like this also writes at 3x and that might be the coolest thing about it not many people have a reason to write out lots of floppies these days but back when this was new in o2 there were probably still people doing small scale software distribution on floppy disk and this would have been one of the fastest ways to do that since you could write out as many as three disks per minute in fact faster if you weren't filling up the whole disk now do i recommend you get a collectible digital camera and wear it out in a couple of weeks by reading and writing hundreds of disks with it no probably don't do that but it is cool that you could a better way to do that than and now might have been to get a lacie pocket floppy yet again another unlabeled generic looking usb floppy drive but per the catalog it could do 4x and it's actually a dedicated drive rather than a repurposed camera i have a few concerns with that one though first i've never seen one never found one on ebay so they seem pretty rare and i don't know how they actually perform second they made two different models one 4x one only one x in the same goddamn case the only way you can find out which one is which is by flipping it over and reading the inscrutable catalog number off the bottom why don't any of these companies seem to think the speed of the drive is worth mentioning i don't get it not only do they not write it on the drive it's not even on the label they almost try to bury it supposedly there's another 4x drive out there from a ye data that one seems even rarer but in the only blurry pictures i can find it also doesn't say anything on it what's going on here if i made one of these the whole top would be embossed 4x it's the primary selling point but anyway the final concern i have with those drives is that they might read it 4x but they may not write at 4x and i base that on the final product that i want to show you today this is an ls 120 drive you might have heard of these before more accurately you might have seen them in your bios since for some reason a lot of computers in the 2000s had the ability to boot from ls 120 but if you're like me you've probably never actually seen one in the flesh before here it is now this was one of several super floppy formats that started popping up in the 90s and notionally the idea was that these were updated floppy disks using basically the same disk but packing a lot more data onto them unfortunately the only one that really had in the uptake in the u.s was the well-known i omega zip although i don't think many people would think of that as a floppy i mean it is technically about the same thing it's got most of the same parts but they look so different the ls-120 on the other hand was a lot closer to the original floppy design in fact this here is an ls120 disc and while it may look superficially different at first if you put it side by side with a normal floppy like i'm doing in this b-roll you'll see that they're pretty dang similar it's got a weirdly shaped shutter an odd surface texture and everything's rounded over but it's the same size and shape it's got the same little windows in the corners and in fact it will actually load into an ordinary floppy drive although it definitely will not read in there that's because despite being similar the capacity of ls 120 is more than 80 times larger than a normal floppy disk they're called ls 120 because they store 120 megabytes it's a motorized drive i'm not going to bother plugging it in just so i can pretend to bring the disc in let's just look at the b-roll as you can see here there really is 120 megs of capacity despite this being basically the old familiar floppy disk now a floppy disk that stores 120 megs always seemed super cool to me at a distance but now that i own one i think i have some ideas why it failed i mean it did come out years after the zip disk and it had less capacity it still probably could have won out but there's one big problem with it i've noticed it feels cheap normal floppy disks have this sort of indestructible nintendo controller feeling to them but this one feels wispy and fragile like i'm going to break it at any moment and putting it in the drive feels awful as well i mean you don't have this nice clunk at the end to let you know it's in you just sort of come to a mushy stop and then hope the drive grabs it it feels terrible now on top of all this panasonic who was a big champion of this format actually tried to compete with sony by making their own uh mavicka that took ls 120s that's this guy here i'll try and do a proper video on it at some point i don't have all the appropriate cables and batteries for it yet but i've used this and it also feels and looks cheap the controls and the styling and whatnot just really don't feel up to par it really seems like the manufacturers didn't put the money into this format that they should have in addition it does not seem all that fast i couldn't get a good test with wind image due to the size but i tested moving several files on and off of the disk in windows explorer and i clocked the read speed at about 660 kilobytes per second which is much better than it could be but it's still fairly sluggish at that rate it would take you three minutes to read an entire disk and i've read that zip disks could be as much as two to four times faster on top of that it writes at only half that speed 330 kilobytes per second so it would take six minutes to write an entire disk at that point i think you're getting into like cd burning territory there are also mixed opinions on reliability from what i understand so all together it's maybe for the best uh that zipped one out but in this case we don't even care about the format right now it's actually the drive that we're interested in see this drive is actually just a floppy drive with a more sophisticated mechanism and if you have any doubt this will actually read ordinary floppies ah man i pushed it all the way in how i gotta get the power cord to get the disc out anyway here it is reading a standard format three and a half inch disk and more importantly it's reading it really fast now i saw people on forums claiming the ls120 could read floppies at up to 5x i have not seen that performance myself however my understanding is there are faster and slower ls 120 drives maybe if i'd gotten one of the ata or scuzzy ones they would read floppies faster i got this usb one for convenience however and it certainly does not go that quick however it is at least 4x i get consistent 14 second copies which means this is copying at 100 kilobytes per second now whether 25k really is our baseline and whether my testing is rigorous at all or not there's no question this thing screams just watching the progress bar you can tell it is hauling ass perceptually it feels much faster than even the mavica so although i still don't recommend using this for archival without consulting the experts if they had no complaints this might be the fastest method i'm aware of for rapidly imaging floppy disks especially since they're still readily available on ebay although they are a little pricey however if you want to drive for riding discs this is actually nearly the worst choice this drive took about 39 seconds to write out a whole disc which puts it on par with the dell and at that point just use the dell it doesn't require an external power supply and it's a lot smaller i'm not sure why this one is so slow maybe they just weren't optimizing for writes and wanted to play it safe and maybe this isn't true for all ls 120s i don't know but that's why i have concerns that maybe some of the other high-speed drives on the market also have asymmetric read and write speeds since they were likely optimizing for read fortunately however very few of us care about writing discs these days so it seems like the ls120 is the clear winner here anyway that's all i have to say about this if you enjoyed this video please subscribe so i know you're into this sort of thing remember to turn on notifications if you want to know when i upload stuff if you really like this video consider supporting me on patreon like these folks here are doing it costs quite a bit to get all these gadgets to show you not to mention to afford the studio i'm showing them to you in so i'm very grateful to everyone who's supporting me i could not do this without them to everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude - CRD

Views: 213,888

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics

Id: wWwp3vVtElw

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022