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USB floppy

Posted by: beachycove on 2010-12-03 11:54:42 I landed this week for $4 a NIB Iomega USB floppy drive, which I find works fine with my Pismo without drivers (OS9), but not at all on a G5 running X.5. Still, it's nice to have a floppy for Pismo sneakernet file transfers to older equipment.

Posted by: Classic Mac on 2010-12-03 19:04:26 We just got a Teac one at the thrift and it works on everything even the intel mini.

Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-12-03 22:42:14 Do other USB mass storage devices (flash drives, hard drives, etc) work on the G5? USB floppy drives should use the standard USB Mass Storage drivers...so as long as you can use other mass storage devices on the G5 you shouldn't have any trouble with a floppy drive.

Posted by: applefreak on 2010-12-05 07:16:59 i have no problems with USB storage devices on my G5's (2 Powermacs, 2 iMacs); HD external, stick, ipod but data transfer is slow, so i prefer firewire 400/800 external HDs the floppy drive i use is from imation

Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2010-12-05 07:26:09 SuperDisk drives are the best because they read and write 1.44 MB disks much faster than normal disk drives. They also support SuperDisks (100MB floppies) but those don't have much purpose nowadays.

Posted by: beachycove on 2010-12-05 18:08:35 The Iomega USB floppy works fine on my G4 Cube running X.4.11, connected to the built-in USB1 hub in an acrylic Apple LCD. Still no show on the G5 running X.5, no matter what USB port I connect it to: keyboard, CPU, and aluminum Apple display.

Posted by: Concorde1993 on 2010-12-05 18:25:37 The driver on your USB floppy is probably outdated (well it is anyway, but you know what I mean) hence why the G5 cannot register it. I had a similar problem when I tried to hookup my 2004 Lacie USB floppy drive to my 2010 MBP (which is now running 10.6.5). So I went online, and downloaded a more current driver for it on Lacie's website. It works now.

Posted by: beachycove on 2010-12-05 19:13:13 According to Iomega, the drivers are built into the Mactintosh OS, both Classic and OSX. The documentation, however, only goes up to X.2. It's not a big deal. I am still pleased with the "conquest."

Posted by: beachycove on 2010-12-06 16:54:55 An interesting find just now was that, having installed X.4.11 on the G5 because of minor stability problems in X.5, I find that the Iomega USB floppy works.... So presumably, the built-in floppy driver on which the Iomega drive relies was removed from X.5.

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