DIY 118GB Floppy Drive Makes Those A Drives Useful Again

Anyone who has been around computers for very long will remember the good ol' A drive. Back in the day, the 3.5-inch floppy drive sat at the top of the drive hierarchy and if you venture into BIOS, you can still find remnants of that drive, even if you have never owned one. Computer geeks who hoard their gear probably have a slew of 3.5-inch floppy drives sitting around and if so, you can make yourself this floppy drive with 118GB of storage.

Originally, the 3.5-inch floppy disc had a scant 1.4MB of storage. If you ever had to install a game from floppies, you will remember the joy that was cycling through a massive stack of numbered floppies waiting for your game to install. As it turns out the sliding metal shutter that originally covered the magnetic storage material in the floppy is the exact right size to hold a SD card securely.

As it turns out it's also easy to trick the computer into reading the SD card using the floppy hardware inside the drive. The process of hacking the floppy drive to read the SD card involves removing some of the pins in the cable inside the drive and bending others up. You can see this in the second image above.

Once cut and bent correctly all you need to do is slip the floppy shell into the drive with the SD card crammed inside and you have a floppy drive with more storage space that computer geeks could have dreamed of back in the day. If you are wondering, the other end of the floppy drive cable is soldered to a USB 3 connector since the floppy header won't handle the data and the floppy ribbon cable connector is extinct on modern mainboards.

SOURCE: Gizmodo