Modder turned a 20-year-old floppy drive into a modern card reader (7 photos + video)
One netizen shared the process of modifying his computer to make the floppy drive the main USB port.
The basis was taken from the 1995 IBM Aptiva PC system unit. The unit received modern “stuffing”, including a cooling system, an Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz processor, a Radeon R9 390 8GB video card, and more.
The main discovery of the retrograde engineer was the similarity of the technical design of the connectors between the drive of ordinary 3.5-inch floppy disks and the USB card reader for SD flash cards. The distance between the pins of the ports coincides and the card is ideally inserted into the plastic case of the floppy disk under the protective curtain, which remains functionally necessary.
The floppy drive port itself was re-soldered, getting rid of extra unnecessary pins and adapting it to a bus for an ordinary 6-dollar Transend USB 3.0 adapter. It is physically impossible to connect a flash card to the port from a floppy drive, and it was decided not to leave the old motherboard.
Ultimately, the PC visually began to identify the flash card as a 128 GB floppy disk, however, in addition to design changes, this was achieved by simply replacing the icon on the disk volume. As netizens noted, it is a pity that it was not possible to preserve the “canonical” sound of the reading floppy drive.
