These are incredibly useful for "tweener" machines. I have one, in addition to a 360K and a 1.2 floppy in my Optiplex GX110. Your transfer speed bottleneck is likely due to the IDE to USB transition. You should consider trying IDE to SATA or possibly look for a PCI-e to IDE card.
I always had really poor results with 720k disks in my LS-120 drive, even just trying to read them. 1.44 was reasonably reliable, but there were still marginal disks that would read in a "pure" floppy drive that wouldn't read in the LS-120. Frankly I was surprised to see 720k Just Worked like that, even if slowly.
I added an internal floppy drive to my main Windows 10 PC a while back using a somewhat-expensive floppy - USB adapter and a USB header - port converter cable. Works quite well and is quite nice. For most people I would highly recommend getting a socket 775 machine with a Core 2 in it, as they have built-in floppy headers and Windows 10 support. They are often dirt-cheap or even free, and sometimes even come with floppy drives installed (which is where I got my black one). Saves a machine from the dump, they are incredibly reliable (I have yet to see one die), most are quite small, and they take to both Windows 10 and floppy drives quite well :) Hate Windows 10 all you want, but the one trick up it's sleeve is it's sheer amount of compatibility. Windows 10 by far is the most compatible OS that I have ever used (and I got my start on XP and still use it and 7 to this day). I was definitely shocked to see a floppy drive just boop in, full-supported, when I installed mine. My only gripe is the lack of Zip drive support, but from what I hear Zip drives were flaky to begin with, so nothing really new here. Great video! I always love these inter-generational hardware projects. Basically everything I do is a crazy mish-mash of the old and the new, trying to connect them all together and make it all function as one. Definitely something that no one ever does or wants, and I certainly find myself asking really stupid questions that no one asks or ever needs, but regardless it's fun :)
Ohhh, so Win 10 doesn't support ZIP after all? I thought it might. Bit of a shame, since I've been aiming for a fully loaded out tall tower ATX case (6 5.25'' bays and 2-3 3,5'' ones) and I've been thinking of using some extra IDE drives, such as ZIP or MO. Do you think Win 10 would support a magneto-optical drive?
@@SaturnineXTS Windows 10 does support Magneto-Optical, I believe, and it does support Zip, however with Zip it supports *very few* devices, so you have to buy one of the very few products that actually works in Windows 10
@@SaturnineXTS Depends actually. You can get SCSI working in Windows 10, but not SCSI Zip. As for IDE Zip, pretty much all regular IDE controllers for motherboard and expansion cards will not work for Zip drives. There is one StarTech IDE controller card that will let you use IDE Zip drives on Windows 10, but otherwise IDE Zip will not work :/
I definitely think this way as well! I love when I can make my new and old technology work together and often improving both. I plan on installing an internal floppy drive on my new windows 10 computer just as soon as I find my old floppy disks.
That seems like a great solution. I have been starting to feel like we are going to need a chain of machines from different eras to be able to get from retro to modern but at least were not there yet!
OMG, I can't believe I've actually never thought of this. I'll definitely be looking that much harder for a LS120 or LS240 drive now. I wonder if the other drive formats that were out at the time will also work. Just like you, even if the LS disks don't work, I won't be as fussed.
So long as they sit on the IDE bus I don't see why it wouldn't work with the same sort of IDE to USB device, well, assuming there is also driver support. I've actually been thinking of removing the Blu-ray/DVD burner drive from this system and instead fitting an older IDE CD-RW drive. It might be the speed, I'm not sure, but the modern burner, if I write a CD-R of a game ISO for example it won't read in my older drives. I need to burn it each time on my laptop which goes down to 10x speed. I've actually been wanting to test this burn speed theory in more detail, maybe next year.
I had one of these, and a CD burner. I'd use LS-120 discs to hold "offline data" until I had enough to fill a CD, so I only ended up using the same box of 10 over and over for years, until it was practical to let 700 MB accumulate on the hard drive.
Great video Sir! As for your problem reading 120mb disks, the faut there is 100% on the IDE to USB adapter that is probably not translating the ATAPI signals properly to Windows 10. I have three external USB (1.1) Imation LS120 drives and they all work just fine on all machines I have here running three different versions of Windows (98 SE, XP and 10 Pro 21H2). But I agree that the main reason to use LS120 drives nowadays is just to read/write old floppy disks. So you're not losing much anyway... Oh and by the way, LS120 drives do read/write different types of media at different speeds (they are way faster reading/writing LS120 media than 1.44 floppies for example).
I've since changed things slightly and now have a PCI-E IDE card installed. LS120 disks still won't read though perhaps that too isn't translating the signals properly. Not that it matters though as its the only LS120 drive I have. But its still all going strong, I use it regularly to write disks for the vintage machines.
@@CRG Hmmm... That’s a plot twist… I think such a proper PCI-E IDE controller card is very likely to be able to forward ATAPI signals correctly to Windows. In that case you can try to get new LS120 media (+/- US$15 per disk on eBay) if you want to rule out the possibility of the problem really being with your old LS120 diskette instead.
I bought an LS-120 drive with some discs many, many years ago and it's been in my old PC for many, many years and worked perfectly the last time I tried it (which was about 4 years ago) and I thought about seeing if I could get a USB adapter for it to see if I could get it to work with my Windows 11 laptop and after seeing this video, I think it seems pointless to even try it because it won't read the 120 discs. I think a standard USB floppy disc drive would be easier. Thank you for this video, it's great to see someone try it. :)
Oddly, about a weeks ago or so, I looked through the whole internet (and that's a huge place) for a specific adaptor cable. I did not find it. And then, in the middle of your video, there it is !!! It's that adaptor that goes from USB "A" female to USB 4 pin motherboard header. The reason for getting that adaptor has gone away, but, thanks to you, I see that it does exist. Even though you were holding the small plastic bag it came in backward, I did spot the manufacturer. It's kinda expensive but, in a particular situation, it could save your life. Thanks again !
Here's a link to the one I have, or one very similar at least. It's not that expensive on eBay. www.ebay.co.uk/itm/StarTech-com-15-24cm-USB-2-0-Cable-USB-A-Female-to-USB-Motherboard-4-Pin-/380662654802?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286&mkrid=710-127635-2958-0
Thanks, all is good here. I've been in the UA-cam game now for a few years and still plenty to more to come. Mostly PC stuff next month if that's your interest 👍
@@CRG I came across this video while looking into how I can get the floppy drive working in a sleeper build I'm doing! Sadly the motherboard is the last part to arrive in the post so I'm doing some research in the meantime 😁
@@ginger_wby I still have the drive in the machine but I've since changed to a pcie ide card. Still works the same way though. If you want to simply have a floppy drive (not an ls120) something like a usb to floppy interface connected as I done might be the way to do it. I don't think there are any pcie to floppy cards.
You would need Visual Studio to build (compile) the source code for x64 and/or x64 and enable developer support for non-signed drivers in order to use this code sample on Windows 10/11. I assume it would work fine. Thanks for the pointer. I recently bought 2 NOS USB LS-120 External driver myself.
FWIW, I use a TEAC FD-05UW, it's a native USB floppy drive designed for internal mounting... It's a half-height 3.5" drive unfortunately, but it has worked for all the 1.44MB and 720KB disks I've thrown at it. Even worked raw writing, which has came in handy for a few Mac machines.
I've been coming up with this idea that I want a full ATX mother board, in a replica or original IBM 5150 case in black. With a modern slot loading drive, and a 3.5" drive bay. Having a 720k drive just work in windows is so frickin cool.
Great video. I did something similar for transferring data to and from my MSX2 computer as well as to and from my retro-PC, although I am using Linux. I deliberately did not put it in my main system because Windows 10 does nasty things to the boot sectors of your disks (be they floppy disks or CF cards etc.), which more often than not makes them incompatible with older DOS-based OS-es. The LS-120 drive can happily read, write and format 720kB and 1.44MB disks, although I have not tried a LS-120 disk yet. The only thing so far that I have not been able to do properly is read single sided 3.5" disks. It sees it as a 720kB disk (even though the media-ID byte is different), so if I do a dd from it it will try to read both sides, with side 2 reading as sectors filled with 0xf6. The LS-120 drive is attached to the IDE interface of a PCIe card.
Hi. I read your comment regarding Win10 and its formatting of the floppy being non compatible with older machines running DOS type OS. Just to clarify - you are saying that whilst Win10 will happily format the floppy as 720 - 1,44Mb. the win10 software does something to the disk that makes non transferable to an older machine. Is that correct
@@johnworman2910It writes 'garbage' to a certain region of the bootsector, that is usually filled with a string, such as 'FAT12'. This does not affect its operation under Windows 10, but it renders the disk unreadable under MS-DOS, even though the data is still there and can be restored.
I had floppy disk camera for a number of years ( still have it ) and have hundreds of floppies. Trying to get all the information off of them. I have a 1999 laptop with a floppy drive and USB capability and use it to read them. I wanted another as some were hard reading and my son picked up a nice Sony floppy drive that plugs in to USB. It works good on my wife's windows 10 laptop.
Didn't the ls120 also let you format a regular 1.4mb disk to about 30mb? I remember that being very handy but again you needed an ls120 drive to read the contents.
Thank you for this video! I was trying to see if I could hook up a similar floppy disc drive to my gaming PC so I could play some cool original floppy disc games like doom and stuff
I have seen that there are USB to 34 pin Floppy adapters for less than a tenner on everyone's favourite online auction site, maybe one of those with an old FDD would also do the job, they appear to be bus powered with a short cable from the board to the FDD which would possibly make things a little neater internally
@@CRG You may be right, I know they generally don't support 720k drives but I don't know if that also applies to the disks themselves or if the limitation on the common USB floppy drives comes from the drive mechanism, I do know someone who uses one with an old 1.44MB drive to write to 720k atari ST disks on a Windows 10 PC
I own two LS120 drives in older Win98 machines. I recently purchased a new box o 120mb disks and they wouldn't read or write at first but after inserting the disks a few time both the drives started working. Must have been a misaligned laser. Also it says on the box to not reformat disks weird but maybe there is reasoning behind that.
Great video! I think you should enable adverts so your videos pop up easier with searches and what-not. In fact your videos are better put together than other UA-camr content creators who have over 20k subscribers. But they enable adverts. I'm sure you know this better than I do, but your videos are really good and need more views!!! Cheers, Matt.
That is very kind of you to say. Adverts are enabled on my videos although for this one and given the short run time I opted to not have any mid roll ads.
I recently got a superdisk drive for my test PC aswell, It has a H55 Chipset and an built In IDE controller. By connecting the LS120 Drive directly to the IDE controller it read the LS-120 disk perfectly fine in windows 10. So I suspect it might be the USB IDE adaptor dont support certain ATAPI command sets, I'd recommend try it with the native IDE controller for best compatibility. Cheers. : )
These drives are super handy, put one in my PowerMac G4 to write HD floppies for my 68K Macs. Only in OSX though, they didn't seem to write an OS9 driver for the IDE version, just USB.
It's easy enough to read and write floppy with external 3,5'' drives. There are no external 5.25'' drives though, and that's where those early Core 2 Duo chipsets/motherboards come in handy - they support 5.25'', and a limited number of them also supports dual floppies, while they're still Win 10 compatible.
Man thanks for this video. Ive got to try something like this. The company i work at uses floppy drives for all our cnc programs and the chinese usb floppy drives oddly hang up the computer in normal operating stuff which is kind of odd. I want to try this and see if it changes anything. Thanks again
This makes me want to buy my own LS-120 drive for just the same reasons. I do wonder if it would play nice with the SIIG IDE/SATA PCIe x1 controller card that I recently picked up while thrifting, though. If that USB solution ever gives you any issues, that may be an alternative route to connect that drive.
I did consider one of those and may yet get one to play with but was just handier to use the parts I had lying. Would be interesting to see if it works but also I'd like to see how it handles old HDDs or CD-ROMs.
3 days ago, i got an 3.5 USB external floppy drive, and it works fine on Windows 10. I have a lot of 3.5 old drives, and i have an old computer with both 5.25 and 3.5 drives. It would be good to find an adaptator like yours for the 5.25 disk drive.
Sadly it seems like you're stuck with older Core 2 Duo motherboards, those still support 5.25'' floppy drives. Either that or you can get a specialized adapter, but that's only for reading, not writing sadly
Good video buddy thanks. I'd like to try this system as I have an old Yamaha keyboard with a floppy drive but it's off course not writable. So your system looks ideal. My newer Yamaha keyboard is USB so it's only the older one for the floppy midi files. Thanks again bud.
im looking for a fluorescent 3.5 inch floppy disc drive cover case (enclosure) ?? can some1 help me out please?? im looking to buy one thanks..................
I have the same drive and usb adapter on my Win 10 system and it read/writes and formats LS120 Disks just fine. The name in device manager is what windows gets back from any drive when it asks its name, if you go to driver details you will find windows is using the sfloppy.sys (superfloppy) driver already, my guess your LS120 disk is bad. As for the SATA adapter you need one that uses a JM20330 chipset and the SATA controller on the mainboard needs to be set to IDE mode, if it is set to AHCI mode windows detects the drive as a generic removable drive instead of a SuperFloppy and it wont work at all.
More blasts from the past. I burned through two Iomega LS120s in my days. They did burn out the guidance lasers that guided the magnetic head, effectively bricking the drive then. After that I switched over to a LightScribe capable CD drive. I wonder, can you plug that LS120 into an HDD docking station?
I wonder how much life this one has in it. Works fine although some of the noises out of it are concerning, probably just normal for the type of drive though. LightScribe, I've had a few drives that claim to be able to do it although I admit I've never used it. I do remember one guy in college burning CD-Rs of game "back-ups" and using the lightscribe for the label. I don't see why the LS120 wouldn't work in a HDD dock just so long as the dock is connected to the IDE bus. Not sure about an external USB dock and also not sure about hot swapping but would be interesting to try.
Neat video. I guess this was something that was niggling at the back of your mind for some time and you just had to act on it? I tried my own USB floppy and yup, no 720K and it refused to recognize a 1.44 MB that had the hole covered up. makes me want to get out my IDE LS-120 to try to get it to read the 120 MB disks. Just because.
Yep it's been something I've wanted to do for a while and this was the week. It's great that the ls120 reads and writes the 720 disks as that will really come in handy. Bit of a shame the 120mb disks don't work. If you try your drive and have any better luck let me know.
I have my old Iomega i believe usb 3.5" floppy but window does not recognize it at all, might have worked in the 32 bit version but in x64 no luck. I do have an old Pentium 100 running os/2 with 3.5 and 5.25 working flioppy's :)
Good stuff!…I had dusted off my old video game floppies and bought a usb 1 Sony drive to try and retrieve some stuff, but I’m just getting win 10 crash and reboot or disk not recognized…bugger 🧐
Since your machine lacks IDE you could try converting that into SATA drive. You should try using one of those if your system has any SATA ports on the machine. That or an IDE PCI expansion card could work if you lack SATA ports. I myself will likely have to go the PCI card route as my mobo won't have enough SATA ports for everything. :P You might not get the proper read/write speeds for that drive until you connect it to either SATA via adapter or to a IDE expansion card. My drive came out of an iMation branded enclosure so was originally an external drive. Had to get a 3D printed a face plate as they appear to be unobtainium for some reason. The iMation USB enclosure won't work on Win7 or newer OSs without a unsigned driver which is a bigger problem in Win8 and newer. :( On the subject of driversigning and PCI stuff, I test signed a driver for my SCSI PCI card (as it had to be modified to make my ancient SCSI card work on modern OS) and for some odd reason after I installed it it continues to work even after I reboot into normal mode with driver signing turned on. Maybe Win8 treats USB stuff differently or something. The test signing shenanigans shouldn't be needed for LS120 drives as long as they are connected via SATA/IDE or a standard USB to IDE adapter that has signed drivers. Maybe they fixed this in Win 10/11 but in Win8.1 at least I got my SCSI card to work without much fuss. LS120 disks still work in Win8.1 at least. So yeah yet another reason I don't want to use Windows 10 or 11. :P
Your Adaptor , At 2.37 you state that it is IDE 40 pin - I have the same unit you are using , 40 pin ect and power block ect - My 2 floppy drives from old pcs have 34 pins connection and my 40-pin adaptor will not plug in - Can you please explain how you did this - Thank You
The ls120 disk drive I used in this video is an ide device. A standard floppy disk drive cannot be connected to an ide interface, only this ls120 drive can be.
@@CRG yeah if I'm working on 4K footage, I can use up about 32-40GB in one project with Adobe Premier. I also found the speed to be really important though... Definitely better to have 32GB DDR4 36000 than 64GB 2133. That's just something I did for sciences sake, since I had the RAM laying around, and my 3700x lost about 25% of its performance on the 2133 memory. I'd say now is a good time to grab another 16 gigs though. Price is creeping up. That oLOY RAM plays nice with every kit I've mixed it with too.
You might be able to install Windows XP or Win2k on a VirtualBox machine, then pass the USB LS120 through to that VM? Then use the legacy drivers on the VM to access it.
I tried something like that to get a CF boot drive up and running with MS-DOS 6.22, but with very little luck. Windows 10 really likes writing bits and pieces of information to the MBR or boot sector of your external disks and render them unusable on OS-es like MS-DOS, even if you try and bypass the host OS entirely by mapping the drive directly into your VM. I would then use the same setup to copy data to the CF card from within the VM and after that it was basically touch and go: sometimes I would be able to boot from the CF card, at other times I would not and only the primary partition would still be there, the extended partition with all the logical drives would be gone. What I ended up doing was buying an LS-120 drive, copy the MS-DOS 6.22 images to floppy and install it on my retro-pc directly. As for the CF card in my MSX2: I copy data to and from it using a CF card reader on the same Linux system that I also have the LS-120 drive in.
Just out of curiosity have you tried it in Windows XP I have one set up just like that and it reads both discs 1.44 and ls120 if you cannot read the ls120 it is probably a damaged drive it shows in Windows XP the same way that it shows on your Windows 10 setup in device manager
Yes I put one in my win 10 2 years ago. It is beast to format the disk on a dos system first then put the disk in the windows 10 system to copy the files over. windows 10 dos not like to format the disk the right way I got lots of errors on the disk. and I have a PCI-e x 1 ide adapter so I have a ls120 ide drive and a zip 100 ide drive in my system.
@@CRG Yes I love it and it was e-z to do...www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00B4-00022?Description=ide%20pci-e&cm_re=ide_pci-e-_-9SIAFY68VA7701-_-Product&quicklink=true
My gut feeling is that the implementation of IDE on the card is somehow incomplete and perhaps if you tried a few different brands you might happen upon a working one. Just a thought. Also if you haven't tried it already, boot Linux from a USB stick and test it there. At least you can rule the OS out then.
I haven't tried linux as to be honest I'm not good with it but so many people have suggested it now that I think its only right I at least give it a go and see. As for the IDE /SATA converter I'm not actually sure if the one I had works. The soldering on it is terrible. I am tempted to get one of those IDE to PCI-E cards and try it that way too.
@@CRG More than happy to help you through the Linux part to confirm the problem. I'm sure many of us are. Good luck though, would be great to see it working.
@@CRG LS-120 support is gone from Linux, Puppy Linux still supports a lot of older hardware and there was PL forum thread from 3 years ago were someone was trying to read LS-120 disks but not having any luck, seems LS-120 is gone even from Puppy, you could always give it a try with a Puppy Live USB boot.
put a older windows into a emulator - virtual pc/ vmware / whatever that lets you pass the usb into the emulator and it should work, even normal old software can fit into this category
its cheaper and eiser to just have a usb to 3.5 floppy. pluss you can just put it away when not using it and probably even still use it for decades from now on any computer
I did go looking for a windows 7 driver but couldn't find much. What I did find in some old forum threads suggested that the ls120 drive just doesn't work under windows 7 although I'm not sure.
Hello, I bought a device that connects a floppy disk to a PC via USB to transfer rhythms to my Korg PA55. However, when I format the floppy disk with the Korg and format it from the Korg, the PC does not read the floppy disk. When I format the floppy disk with the PC and transfer data, the Korg does not read the floppy disk at all. How can I solve this problem?
Make sure the diskette is DOS formatted. This is a typical Windows format, and you can also create this type of diskette on a Mac by selecting the 'DOS' option when preparing the diskette. It is written in the user manual."
The IDE to USB adapter was just a cheap thing from eBay. I have since changed this slightly in that its now connected over a IDE PCI-E card , its just cleaner inside the case (startech unit from amazon). Unfortunately the 120MB issue cannot be resolved, its just not supported in windows 10.
Would just need to find a floppy controller and then it should work but getting a controller would be difficult. You might be able to hack up one of those usb floppy drives as an interface but I'm not sure it'd support the 5.25".
It does look odd having an A: in windows 10 but it has come in really handy for me. I use it all the time to write disks when working on a vintage system.
I don't know why watching someone getting a floppy drive working on a pc is so compelling but here we are :) Great video
These are incredibly useful for "tweener" machines. I have one, in addition to a 360K and a 1.2 floppy in my Optiplex GX110.
Your transfer speed bottleneck is likely due to the IDE to USB transition. You should consider trying IDE to SATA or possibly look for a PCI-e to IDE card.
I always had really poor results with 720k disks in my LS-120 drive, even just trying to read them. 1.44 was reasonably reliable, but there were still marginal disks that would read in a "pure" floppy drive that wouldn't read in the LS-120. Frankly I was surprised to see 720k Just Worked like that, even if slowly.
I added an internal floppy drive to my main Windows 10 PC a while back using a somewhat-expensive floppy - USB adapter and a USB header - port converter cable. Works quite well and is quite nice. For most people I would highly recommend getting a socket 775 machine with a Core 2 in it, as they have built-in floppy headers and Windows 10 support. They are often dirt-cheap or even free, and sometimes even come with floppy drives installed (which is where I got my black one). Saves a machine from the dump, they are incredibly reliable (I have yet to see one die), most are quite small, and they take to both Windows 10 and floppy drives quite well :)
Hate Windows 10 all you want, but the one trick up it's sleeve is it's sheer amount of compatibility. Windows 10 by far is the most compatible OS that I have ever used (and I got my start on XP and still use it and 7 to this day). I was definitely shocked to see a floppy drive just boop in, full-supported, when I installed mine. My only gripe is the lack of Zip drive support, but from what I hear Zip drives were flaky to begin with, so nothing really new here.
Great video! I always love these inter-generational hardware projects. Basically everything I do is a crazy mish-mash of the old and the new, trying to connect them all together and make it all function as one. Definitely something that no one ever does or wants, and I certainly find myself asking really stupid questions that no one asks or ever needs, but regardless it's fun :)
Ohhh, so Win 10 doesn't support ZIP after all? I thought it might. Bit of a shame, since I've been aiming for a fully loaded out tall tower ATX case (6 5.25'' bays and 2-3 3,5'' ones) and I've been thinking of using some extra IDE drives, such as ZIP or MO. Do you think Win 10 would support a magneto-optical drive?
@@SaturnineXTS Windows 10 does support Magneto-Optical, I believe, and it does support Zip, however with Zip it supports *very few* devices, so you have to buy one of the very few products that actually works in Windows 10
@@xPLAYnOfficial I'm pretty sure I'll need to find something IDE, as SCSI is off the table for obvious reasons
@@SaturnineXTS Depends actually. You can get SCSI working in Windows 10, but not SCSI Zip. As for IDE Zip, pretty much all regular IDE controllers for motherboard and expansion cards will not work for Zip drives. There is one StarTech IDE controller card that will let you use IDE Zip drives on Windows 10, but otherwise IDE Zip will not work :/
I definitely think this way as well! I love when I can make my new and old technology work together and often improving both. I plan on installing an internal floppy drive on my new windows 10 computer just as soon as I find my old floppy disks.
That seems like a great solution. I have been starting to feel like we are going to need a chain of machines from different eras to be able to get from retro to modern but at least were not there yet!
Not yet but it'll be interesting to see if windows 11 still has support for floppy drives.
OMG, I can't believe I've actually never thought of this. I'll definitely be looking that much harder for a LS120 or LS240 drive now. I wonder if the other drive formats that were out at the time will also work. Just like you, even if the LS disks don't work, I won't be as fussed.
So long as they sit on the IDE bus I don't see why it wouldn't work with the same sort of IDE to USB device, well, assuming there is also driver support.
I've actually been thinking of removing the Blu-ray/DVD burner drive from this system and instead fitting an older IDE CD-RW drive. It might be the speed, I'm not sure, but the modern burner, if I write a CD-R of a game ISO for example it won't read in my older drives. I need to burn it each time on my laptop which goes down to 10x speed. I've actually been wanting to test this burn speed theory in more detail, maybe next year.
I had one of these, and a CD burner. I'd use LS-120 discs to hold "offline data" until I had enough to fill a CD, so I only ended up using the same box of 10 over and over for years, until it was practical to let 700 MB accumulate on the hard drive.
Great video. I always find your content interesting because it's on practical & relatable topics. Thanks
Thanks, I appreciate the support.
One reason for the write delay is USB buffering, which makes a copy of the file in system memory before writing to floppy.
Great video Sir! As for your problem reading 120mb disks, the faut there is 100% on the IDE to USB adapter that is probably not translating the ATAPI signals properly to Windows 10. I have three external USB (1.1) Imation LS120 drives and they all work just fine on all machines I have here running three different versions of Windows (98 SE, XP and 10 Pro 21H2). But I agree that the main reason to use LS120 drives nowadays is just to read/write old floppy disks. So you're not losing much anyway...
Oh and by the way, LS120 drives do read/write different types of media at different speeds (they are way faster reading/writing LS120 media than 1.44 floppies for example).
I've since changed things slightly and now have a PCI-E IDE card installed. LS120 disks still won't read though perhaps that too isn't translating the signals properly. Not that it matters though as its the only LS120 drive I have. But its still all going strong, I use it regularly to write disks for the vintage machines.
@@CRG Hmmm... That’s a plot twist… I think such a proper PCI-E IDE controller card is very likely to be able to forward ATAPI signals correctly to Windows. In that case you can try to get new LS120 media (+/- US$15 per disk on eBay) if you want to rule out the possibility of the problem really being with your old LS120 diskette instead.
Dude, you’re logo screen at the end is awesome, nicely done!
That's thanks to my brother in law who does all my channel art.
I bought an LS-120 drive with some discs many, many years ago and it's been in my old PC for many, many years and worked perfectly the last time I tried it (which was about 4 years ago) and I thought about seeing if I could get a USB adapter for it to see if I could get it to work with my Windows 11 laptop and after seeing this video, I think it seems pointless to even try it because it won't read the 120 discs.
I think a standard USB floppy disc drive would be easier.
Thank you for this video, it's great to see someone try it. :)
Oddly, about a weeks ago or so, I looked through the whole internet (and that's a huge place) for a specific adaptor cable. I did not find it. And then, in the middle of your video, there it is !!! It's that adaptor that goes from USB "A" female to USB 4 pin motherboard header. The reason for getting that adaptor has gone away, but, thanks to you, I see that it does exist. Even though you were holding the small plastic bag it came in backward, I did spot the manufacturer. It's kinda expensive but, in a particular situation, it could save your life. Thanks again !
Here's a link to the one I have, or one very similar at least. It's not that expensive on eBay. www.ebay.co.uk/itm/StarTech-com-15-24cm-USB-2-0-Cable-USB-A-Female-to-USB-Motherboard-4-Pin-/380662654802?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286&mkrid=710-127635-2958-0
@@CRG Hey CRG ! Thanks for the link. Right now, I don't need one, but at that price, I'm ordering two... Thanks !
Plesent surprise hearing a good Northern Irish accent on a UA-cam PC video 👌 coming from a Cavan man! Hope all's well with you 👍
Thanks, all is good here. I've been in the UA-cam game now for a few years and still plenty to more to come. Mostly PC stuff next month if that's your interest 👍
@@CRG I came across this video while looking into how I can get the floppy drive working in a sleeper build I'm doing! Sadly the motherboard is the last part to arrive in the post so I'm doing some research in the meantime 😁
@@ginger_wby I still have the drive in the machine but I've since changed to a pcie ide card. Still works the same way though. If you want to simply have a floppy drive (not an ls120) something like a usb to floppy interface connected as I done might be the way to do it. I don't think there are any pcie to floppy cards.
omg i love that the rgb cpu cooler youve got looks like an eye
You would need Visual Studio to build (compile) the source code for x64 and/or x64 and enable developer support for non-signed drivers in order to use this code sample on Windows 10/11. I assume it would work fine. Thanks for the pointer. I recently bought 2 NOS USB LS-120 External driver myself.
The faster transfer speeds were only available with LS120 discs, I used them back in the late 90s for running backups.
I suspected that was the case. Thanks for letting me know.
FWIW, I use a TEAC FD-05UW, it's a native USB floppy drive designed for internal mounting... It's a half-height 3.5" drive unfortunately, but it has worked for all the 1.44MB and 720KB disks I've thrown at it.
Even worked raw writing, which has came in handy for a few Mac machines.
I've been coming up with this idea that I want a full ATX mother board, in a replica or original IBM 5150 case in black. With a modern slot loading drive, and a 3.5" drive bay. Having a 720k drive just work in windows is so frickin cool.
Great video. I did something similar for transferring data to and from my MSX2 computer as well as to and from my retro-PC, although I am using Linux. I deliberately did not put it in my main system because Windows 10 does nasty things to the boot sectors of your disks (be they floppy disks or CF cards etc.), which more often than not makes them incompatible with older DOS-based OS-es. The LS-120 drive can happily read, write and format 720kB and 1.44MB disks, although I have not tried a LS-120 disk yet. The only thing so far that I have not been able to do properly is read single sided 3.5" disks. It sees it as a 720kB disk (even though the media-ID byte is different), so if I do a dd from it it will try to read both sides, with side 2 reading as sectors filled with 0xf6.
The LS-120 drive is attached to the IDE interface of a PCIe card.
Hi. I read your comment regarding Win10 and its formatting of the floppy being non compatible with older machines running DOS type OS. Just to clarify - you are saying that whilst Win10 will happily format the floppy as 720 - 1,44Mb. the win10 software does something to the disk that makes non transferable to an older machine. Is that correct
@@johnworman2910It writes 'garbage' to a certain region of the bootsector, that is usually filled with a string, such as 'FAT12'. This does not affect its operation under Windows 10, but it renders the disk unreadable under MS-DOS, even though the data is still there and can be restored.
@@damouze thanks for that. Really heps. Good old microsoft😳
I had floppy disk camera for a number of years ( still have it ) and have hundreds of floppies. Trying to get all the information off of them.
I have a 1999 laptop with a floppy drive and USB capability and use it to read them.
I wanted another as some were hard reading and my son picked up a nice Sony floppy drive that plugs in to USB.
It works good on my wife's windows 10 laptop.
Didn't the ls120 also let you format a regular 1.4mb disk to about 30mb? I remember that being very handy but again you needed an ls120 drive to read the contents.
Only the LS240 supported that and those drives are very hard to find these days. :(
Thank you for this video! I was trying to see if I could hook up a similar floppy disc drive to my gaming PC so I could play some cool original floppy disc games like doom and stuff
I believe I saw your question on FB, and now I see the video on it. Nice! Thank you sir, good vid.
You may well have, on the retro PC gaming group. Some very knowledgeable folk on there.
Thanks for watching.
I have seen that there are USB to 34 pin Floppy adapters for less than a tenner on everyone's favourite online auction site, maybe one of those with an old FDD would also do the job, they appear to be bus powered with a short cable from the board to the FDD which would possibly make things a little neater internally
As I understand those also don't support 720k disks but I may get one to try. I just had all this stuff lying around so was handy to use.
@@CRG You may be right, I know they generally don't support 720k drives but I don't know if that also applies to the disks themselves or if the limitation on the common USB floppy drives comes from the drive mechanism, I do know someone who uses one with an old 1.44MB drive to write to 720k atari ST disks on a Windows 10 PC
I own two LS120 drives in older Win98 machines. I recently purchased a new box o 120mb disks and they wouldn't read or write at first but after inserting the disks a few time both the drives started working. Must have been a misaligned laser. Also it says on the box to not reformat disks weird but maybe there is reasoning behind that.
you are a lifesaver. I thought I could never isw floppy disks again. Now I have a use for my last free 5,25 inch drive bay
Setup an VM with an older Windows and then connect the USB device into the VM
Great video! I think you should enable adverts so your videos pop up easier with searches and what-not. In fact your videos are better put together than other UA-camr content creators who have over 20k subscribers. But they enable adverts. I'm sure you know this better than I do, but your videos are really good and need more views!!! Cheers, Matt.
That is very kind of you to say. Adverts are enabled on my videos although for this one and given the short run time I opted to not have any mid roll ads.
I recently got a superdisk drive for my test PC aswell,
It has a H55 Chipset and an built In IDE controller.
By connecting the LS120 Drive directly to the IDE controller it read the LS-120 disk perfectly fine in windows 10.
So I suspect it might be the USB IDE adaptor dont support certain ATAPI command sets, I'd recommend try it with the native IDE controller for best compatibility.
Cheers. : )
Wouldn't that require either having one on your motherboard, or using a PCI expansion card? Modern motherboards haven't had PCI for years now
Indeed, although on AliExpress I do found some PCIe to SATA/PATA adapter and PCIe to PCI bridge adapter too, perhaps that would be viable alternative.
These drives are super handy, put one in my PowerMac G4 to write HD floppies for my 68K Macs. Only in OSX though, they didn't seem to write an OS9 driver for the IDE version, just USB.
It's easy enough to read and write floppy with external 3,5'' drives. There are no external 5.25'' drives though, and that's where those early Core 2 Duo chipsets/motherboards come in handy - they support 5.25'', and a limited number of them also supports dual floppies, while they're still Win 10 compatible.
2 years later, hmm wonder if I can get this ls120 working so I can move files to my atari ST?
Man thanks for this video. Ive got to try something like this. The company i work at uses floppy drives for all our cnc programs and the chinese usb floppy drives oddly hang up the computer in normal operating stuff which is kind of odd. I want to try this and see if it changes anything. Thanks again
This makes me want to buy my own LS-120 drive for just the same reasons. I do wonder if it would play nice with the SIIG IDE/SATA PCIe x1 controller card that I recently picked up while thrifting, though. If that USB solution ever gives you any issues, that may be an alternative route to connect that drive.
I did consider one of those and may yet get one to play with but was just handier to use the parts I had lying. Would be interesting to see if it works but also I'd like to see how it handles old HDDs or CD-ROMs.
What is the make of the adaptor. The ones I have seen have an external power lead that plugs into 240V. Thanks
Great! I've always wanted to try out one of these drives!!
If you can find one they certainly are an oddity worth looking at. The noises out of them alone are fascinating.
Handy for Winuae as Amiga disks will now work with your setup ..
Excellent vid. I bet that if you did a dual boot Linu=x system that would read the LS-120s
A popular suggestion, I guess I'll have to try it.
3 days ago, i got an 3.5 USB external floppy drive, and it works fine on Windows 10.
I have a lot of 3.5 old drives, and i have an old computer with both 5.25 and 3.5 drives.
It would be good to find an adaptator like yours for the 5.25 disk drive.
Sadly it seems like you're stuck with older Core 2 Duo motherboards, those still support 5.25'' floppy drives. Either that or you can get a specialized adapter, but that's only for reading, not writing sadly
@@SaturnineXTS Yes, you're right, thoose adapters are read only, the only make an image of the disk, but i still have my old computer.
Good video buddy thanks. I'd like to try this system as I have an old Yamaha keyboard with a floppy drive but it's off course not writable. So your system looks ideal. My newer Yamaha keyboard is USB so it's only the older one for the floppy midi files. Thanks again bud.
I have an ls120 drive and i have a 1.3gb mo drive and these seem stupidly expensive on ebay now .
All vintage hardware prices are on the rise. The 1.3GB MO drive sounds interesting. Not sure I've ever seen one of those before.
im looking for a fluorescent 3.5 inch floppy disc drive cover case (enclosure) ?? can some1 help me out please?? im looking to buy one thanks..................
I have the same drive and usb adapter on my Win 10 system and it read/writes and formats LS120 Disks just fine.
The name in device manager is what windows gets back from any drive when it asks its name, if you go to driver details you will find windows is using the sfloppy.sys (superfloppy) driver already, my guess your LS120 disk is bad.
As for the SATA adapter you need one that uses a JM20330 chipset and the SATA controller on the mainboard needs to be set to IDE mode, if it is set to AHCI mode windows detects the drive as a generic removable drive instead of a SuperFloppy and it wont work at all.
You can also try an PCI Express IDE Controller and/or boot a Live Linux distribution and test it there.
I was thinking of trying one of those PCI-E ide cards. Not only to test using this but also HDDs and CD-ROMs.
More blasts from the past. I burned through two Iomega LS120s in my days. They did burn out the guidance lasers that guided the magnetic head, effectively bricking the drive then. After that I switched over to a LightScribe capable CD drive. I wonder, can you plug that LS120 into an HDD docking station?
I wonder how much life this one has in it. Works fine although some of the noises out of it are concerning, probably just normal for the type of drive though. LightScribe, I've had a few drives that claim to be able to do it although I admit I've never used it. I do remember one guy in college burning CD-Rs of game "back-ups" and using the lightscribe for the label.
I don't see why the LS120 wouldn't work in a HDD dock just so long as the dock is connected to the IDE bus. Not sure about an external USB dock and also not sure about hot swapping but would be interesting to try.
Neat video. I guess this was something that was niggling at the back of your mind for some time and you just had to act on it? I tried my own USB floppy and yup, no 720K and it refused to recognize a 1.44 MB that had the hole covered up. makes me want to get out my IDE LS-120 to try to get it to read the 120 MB disks. Just because.
Yep it's been something I've wanted to do for a while and this was the week. It's great that the ls120 reads and writes the 720 disks as that will really come in handy. Bit of a shame the 120mb disks don't work. If you try your drive and have any better luck let me know.
@@CRG of course!
I have my old Iomega i believe usb 3.5" floppy but window does not recognize it at all, might have worked in the 32 bit version but in x64 no luck.
I do have an old Pentium 100 running os/2 with 3.5 and 5.25 working flioppy's :)
Good stuff!…I had dusted off my old video game floppies and bought a usb 1 Sony drive to try and retrieve some stuff, but I’m just getting win 10 crash and reboot or disk not recognized…bugger 🧐
Since your machine lacks IDE you could try converting that into SATA drive. You should try using one of those if your system has any SATA ports on the machine. That or an IDE PCI expansion card could work if you lack SATA ports. I myself will likely have to go the PCI card route as my mobo won't have enough SATA ports for everything. :P
You might not get the proper read/write speeds for that drive until you connect it to either SATA via adapter or to a IDE expansion card.
My drive came out of an iMation branded enclosure so was originally an external drive. Had to get a 3D printed a face plate as they appear to be unobtainium for some reason. The iMation USB enclosure won't work on Win7 or newer OSs without a unsigned driver which is a bigger problem in Win8 and newer. :(
On the subject of driversigning and PCI stuff, I test signed a driver for my SCSI PCI card (as it had to be modified to make my ancient SCSI card work on modern OS) and for some odd reason after I installed it it continues to work even after I reboot into normal mode with driver signing turned on. Maybe Win8 treats USB stuff differently or something. The test signing shenanigans shouldn't be needed for LS120 drives as long as they are connected via SATA/IDE or a standard USB to IDE adapter that has signed drivers. Maybe they fixed this in Win 10/11 but in Win8.1 at least I got my SCSI card to work without much fuss. LS120 disks still work in Win8.1 at least. So yeah yet another reason I don't want to use Windows 10 or 11. :P
I wonder if formatting LS-120 disk from command line would work?
It doesn't. I tried that but it just throws an error.
It should make a comeback in at least a 250MB version since the media itself has no microcontroller on it.
Your Adaptor , At 2.37 you state that it is IDE 40 pin - I have the same unit you are using , 40 pin ect and power block ect - My 2 floppy drives from old pcs have 34 pins connection and my 40-pin adaptor will not plug in - Can you please explain how you did this - Thank You
The ls120 disk drive I used in this video is an ide device. A standard floppy disk drive cannot be connected to an ide interface, only this ls120 drive can be.
We have almost identical daily drivers, except I have the X570 phantom gaming 4, and 64 GB of Oloy Warhawk RAM. Good value system!
Another 16gb of ram wouldn't go a miss in my system I think. It's gets ate up quickly doing the video editing.
@@CRG yeah if I'm working on 4K footage, I can use up about 32-40GB in one project with Adobe Premier. I also found the speed to be really important though... Definitely better to have 32GB DDR4 36000 than 64GB 2133. That's just something I did for sciences sake, since I had the RAM laying around, and my 3700x lost about 25% of its performance on the 2133 memory. I'd say now is a good time to grab another 16 gigs though. Price is creeping up. That oLOY RAM plays nice with every kit I've mixed it with too.
Interesting, I have a sony MPF88E external USB drive and it can write an 800kb photo in 20 seconds
You might be able to install Windows XP or Win2k on a VirtualBox machine, then pass the USB LS120 through to that VM? Then use the legacy drivers on the VM to access it.
I tried something like that to get a CF boot drive up and running with MS-DOS 6.22, but with very little luck. Windows 10 really likes writing bits and pieces of information to the MBR or boot sector of your external disks and render them unusable on OS-es like MS-DOS, even if you try and bypass the host OS entirely by mapping the drive directly into your VM.
I would then use the same setup to copy data to the CF card from within the VM and after that it was basically touch and go: sometimes I would be able to boot from the CF card, at other times I would not and only the primary partition would still be there, the extended partition with all the logical drives would be gone.
What I ended up doing was buying an LS-120 drive, copy the MS-DOS 6.22 images to floppy and install it on my retro-pc directly.
As for the CF card in my MSX2: I copy data to and from it using a CF card reader on the same Linux system that I also have the LS-120 drive in.
Could DOSBOX format an ls120 disk on win 10 with a dos driver installed within a running DOSBOX session? It's a long shot... Probably won't work.
Just out of curiosity have you tried it in Windows XP I have one set up just like that and it reads both discs 1.44 and ls120 if you cannot read the ls120 it is probably a damaged drive it shows in Windows XP the same way that it shows on your Windows 10 setup in device manager
Yes I put one in my win 10 2 years ago. It is beast to format the disk on a dos system first then put the disk in the windows 10 system to copy the files over. windows 10 dos not like to format the disk the right way I got lots of errors on the disk. and I have a PCI-e x 1 ide adapter so I have a ls120 ide drive and a zip 100 ide drive in my system.
I might get one of those pci-e adapters for myself, would be a better long term solution I think compared to the usb interface.
@@CRG Yes I love it and it was e-z to do...www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00B4-00022?Description=ide%20pci-e&cm_re=ide_pci-e-_-9SIAFY68VA7701-_-Product&quicklink=true
Great vídeo CRG
bzzzzt, bzzzt . i cut my teeth on that sound . love your installation.
My gut feeling is that the implementation of IDE on the card is somehow incomplete and perhaps if you tried a few different brands you might happen upon a working one. Just a thought.
Also if you haven't tried it already, boot Linux from a USB stick and test it there. At least you can rule the OS out then.
I haven't tried linux as to be honest I'm not good with it but so many people have suggested it now that I think its only right I at least give it a go and see.
As for the IDE /SATA converter I'm not actually sure if the one I had works. The soldering on it is terrible. I am tempted to get one of those IDE to PCI-E cards and try it that way too.
@@CRG More than happy to help you through the Linux part to confirm the problem. I'm sure many of us are. Good luck though, would be great to see it working.
@@CRG LS-120 support is gone from Linux, Puppy Linux still supports a lot of older hardware and there was PL forum thread from 3 years ago were someone was trying to read LS-120 disks but not having any luck, seems LS-120 is gone even from Puppy, you could always give it a try with a Puppy Live USB boot.
You can use a PATA to SATA converter. No USB is needed.
This has since been changed over to one of those.
Did you try formating the ls120 disk from the command line like the other?
Yes I tried that but it seems that there is just no support for LS120 disks after Windows 2K and maybe XP.
put a older windows into a emulator - virtual pc/ vmware / whatever that lets you pass the usb into the emulator and it should work, even normal old software can fit into this category
its cheaper and eiser to just have a usb to 3.5 floppy. pluss you can just put it away when not using it and probably even still use it for decades from now on any computer
Excellent sir
Thanks
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very nice
Thanks
You can use the Windows 7 drivers for the LS-120 on Windows 10 32-bit, there are no 64-bit drivers...
I did go looking for a windows 7 driver but couldn't find much. What I did find in some old forum threads suggested that the ls120 drive just doesn't work under windows 7 although I'm not sure.
Hello, I bought a device that connects a floppy disk to a PC via USB to transfer rhythms to my Korg PA55. However, when I format the floppy disk with the Korg and format it from the Korg, the PC does not read the floppy disk. When I format the floppy disk with the PC and transfer data, the Korg does not read the floppy disk at all. How can I solve this problem?
You'd need to check what file system the Korg uses and find a means of writing to the file system from within windows.
Thanks @@CRG
Make sure the diskette is DOS formatted. This is a typical Windows format, and you can also create this type of diskette on a Mac by selecting the 'DOS' option when preparing the diskette. It is written in the user manual."
Which IDE to USB adapter did you use? your supply info? Did you ever solve the 120mB issue?
The IDE to USB adapter was just a cheap thing from eBay. I have since changed this slightly in that its now connected over a IDE PCI-E card , its just cleaner inside the case (startech unit from amazon). Unfortunately the 120MB issue cannot be resolved, its just not supported in windows 10.
Okay, I'll buy one for my pc
you could try a pcie IDE card. They go for peanuts on ebay right now, usually with some extra sata ports thrown in.
Yeah it's since been changed to a pcie ide card. Neater setup although it works just the same.
@@CRG that's surprising, I'd have expected it to lost that long pause beforehand, and maybe have a bit less overhead.
6:36 : magic! :)
Is there any way you could do this with a 5.25 floppy disk drive?
Would just need to find a floppy controller and then it should work but getting a controller would be difficult. You might be able to hack up one of those usb floppy drives as an interface but I'm not sure it'd support the 5.25".
1. Did the LS120 need windows drivers to use. Have you tried Linux ?
Haven't tried Linux to be honest but as I understand ls120 support has also been removed from that.
What was the last os that the ls120 drive worked in? make a vm with that os and pass the drive through to it.
From what I can tell officially the last was 98 although there may have been 2K and possibly XP drivers.
Shoutout to the poor git at Microsoft who has to constantly make sure that Windows supports floppy disks.
Must drop him an e-mail about super floppy support :D
Can you not get a SCSI version of that LS120 Floptical drive and use a SCSI2SATA adapter and see if that works as long as you can get the drivers.
I only have this drive, it's ide. I'm not sure if there where SCSI versions. Even external USB drives at the time were just the ide drive inside.
@@CRG I've never heard of an SCSI version either. Just IDE and parallel
modern computer 2019 years
I wonder if you use a live distro of Linux can you access the ls disks 👍👍
Only one way to find out...
@@CRG Can't wait for the video :) :)
1s 120's require iomega scsi drives
Ls120 were not reliable which is one of the resons the format never broke through.
This one is still going strong for now. Not that I write that many disks with it but it's handy to have.
I want to add a floppy disc drive to my PC because my friends call me old for using a DVD drive on my gaming PC in 2022
It does look odd having an A: in windows 10 but it has come in really handy for me. I use it all the time to write disks when working on a vintage system.
@@CRG I want to use one to play old dos games that are on floppy disc
i have tryed everything this might be the solution i have switched to zip 100 disks
why not use a sata to idee converter?
He tried that, 16:00
@ oh how did i miss that
pretty sure it cannot read sd / dd formats ?
which makes this rather useless
I've never had need to read or write a single density disk but this drive certainly can read and write double density as I showed in the video.
bd-rom and floopy