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I need a way to write on floppy disks from my modern PC (motherboard GIGABYTE z730p). I own a Panasonic JU-257A606P I took from an old machine of mine, and before buying a USB floppy drive I wanted to give it a try.
Is there some kind of adapter from the "twisty" IDE cable to modern SATA? Could it possibly work or should I just go for the USB one?
Thanks in advance
There are a number of devices which can be used to connect a floppy drive to a modern computer. Whether they are appropriate in your case depends on what you’re trying to do...
If you want to read and write standard PC floppies (1.44 MiB, perhaps 1.68 MiB; this includes most bootable floppy images), then buying a USB floppy drive will be cheaper than buying one of the devices mentioned in the answer linked above. Many USB drives can also read and write single-density (720 KiB) disks.
If you want to read (and perhaps write) non-standard PC floppies, or floppies from other platforms, or connect a 5.25“ drive, you’ll need another device.
In any case, from a purely financial perspective, there’s nothing worth experimenting with before buying a USB drive, unless you can borrow the equipment. The cheapest options are USB floppy drives (even factoring in the “value” of your existing drive) and discarded PCs with floppy controllers.
If you want something more flexible than a USB floppy drive, but barely more expensive, and you're OK with beginner-level through-hole soldering and a command-line interface on the reading/writing tool, take a look at the FluxEngine.
The FluxEngine is a very cheap USB floppy disk interface capable of reading and writing exotic non-PC floppy disk formats. It allows you to use a conventional PC drive to accept Amiga disks, CLV Macintosh disks, bizarre 128-sector CP/M disks, and other weird and bizarre formats. (Although not all of these are supported yet. I could really use samples.)
The hardware consists of a single, commodity part with a floppy drive connector soldered onto it. No ordering custom boards, no fiddly surface mount assembly, and no fuss: nineteen simpler solder joints and you’re done. You can make one for $15 (plus shipping).
(Basically, you solder one row of the pins on the floppy connector through the holes on a ready-made FPGA development board and assembly is done. If you're poor, you can even use regular pin header and just remember not to connect the cable the wrong way around.)
There's a chart at that link detailing which formats the software for it currently knows how to write, which is also on the GitHub page for the software.
NOTE: I haven't tried it. I already owned a KryoFlux by the time I learned of it and my next purchase is probably going to be parts for a sanni reader.
There are various devices that can interface old floppy drives with your PC via USB. For example, I had success with reading old PC floppies using KryoFlux but there are other solutions out there as well. These are usually not meant to be used to expose your floppy drive as a normal/"live" drive to your OS. Instead, there's software to dump the content of your floppy into images.
