Searching the latest Motherboard with FDD

[Renilak]

I need your help!

 

I’m looking for the latest motherboard with FDD connector on board.

 

I support different companies in terms of hardware or software problems and all of them have different hardware I have to deal with. One company uses RS232 or  use Zip Disk to send data to their machines, to cut out and drill metal, another very small company uses a external tape drive for backup data via LTP with an freaky pass through plug, where u still can use an old printer via LTP with just one LTP port at the same time, and they use that possibility. So here is the Problem: I want to Upgrade my computer and make four PCs to one PC because I have not enough space at home to run four PCs at the same time, and I am sick of unplug and plug in one or another PC.

 

You may think now "Oh no, this will be pretty old hardware from 20 years ago!" but that's not the case. I found a Motherboard from Gigabyte with FDD, PATA, USB 3 (yes 3 my friend), eSATA, Firewire (What the heck is this for? xD) and an (here it gets

pretty awesome) AMD 3+ Socket! (once more not AMD 3 but AMD 3+ !!!)

 

Maybe you ask your self " What do you want? You have your stupid FDD connector on board and can run an AMD FX 8370!" Well, Gigabyte didn't produce the best motherboards in term of "long-lasting " components in 2011, very often they die just because of the cheap stuff they soldered on the board. Did ASUS or MSI produce any kind of motherboard  with something like an AM3+ Socket or something equal for Intel? Linus and Alex made nice Sleeper videos but I need more a kind of powerful multi tool with more than just RJ45 and USB at the back.

 

Please don't tell me I should buy a new motherboard and throw an extension card in it. I need all the "good old stuff" like LTP, RS232, Firewire (what is that for? Some weird, strange, disgusting sort of USB and Network connection? xD) , sure RJ45, USB 1.0 (minimum), COM Port, MIDI Port, PS2 Port, etc. When I buy for all of that expansion cards, I will run out off expansion slots on the motherboard...

 

Please help! What are the latest motherboards of MSI, ASUS, Asrock, etc with FDD connector?

 

 

[Slayer3032]

Most X58 stuff has many of those and are also non-UEFI. Most Westmere hex cores can be found for $8-25(E5649, X5670, ect.) as well and with a little overclocking they will still keep up with newer gen systems. Quite a bit more performance is possible on these boards than similar era AM3 cpus. You can even use DUET and X58's many PCI-e lanes to boot NVMe drives. Most X58 boards lived pretty tame lives and are built fairly well too. I think most of the LGA1366 workstations like the Dell T3500 if you're just looking for something that will work out of the box that will have all of the features you'd need. There's also the HP Z400 and the Lenovos, all of which can be spec'd for dual socket with the T5500, Z600 and D20.

 

These don't have AVX however so if that's an issue you might be searching for something Sandybridge or Piledriver instead but those are less likely to have what you're looking for. Maybe some of the chinese "X79" stuff might have support since they often have some quirky features.

[mariushm]

You can buy USB floppy drives, if you really need to use floppy disks.

 

You can still find motherboards with parallel port header and you can buy the brackets on eBay and various places. Same for COM (serial port) headers.

Firewire is no longer on motherboards and its out of fashion because some of its features are bad for modern computers (a device can access cpu and do bad stuff with memory on the host computer, unlike with USB or other methods where the device always depends on the computer, it's "slave" only). You can buy pci-e firewire controllers.

 

Here's for example board with parallel port and com header and a PCI slot to put a Firewire card in:

ASUS M5A78L-M PLUS/USB3 AM3+ Micro ATX Motherboards - AMD - Newegg.com

ASUS M5A78L-M PLUS/USB3 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com

 

On newer AM4 boards, most use a smaller IO chip, which lacks the parallel port functionality or they don't put the header because it uses too much space.

 

You can still buy "industrial" motherboards that have those headers.

For example Asrock has its "industrial/embedded" division : https://www.asrockind.com/index.us.asp#

 

Go down to the Industrial motherboards and hover mouse over the picture and you'll get menu with ATX and ITX boards grouped by various chipsets.

You'll find boards like IMB-790 with 4 pci-e slots, 3 pci slots, parallel, serial etc : https://www.asrockind.com/overview.us.asp?Model=IMB-790

 

And of course, loads of refurbished computers out there which still have parallel and all that stuff.

 

 

 

 

[Renilak]

Let's try this the other way around: I have a Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 Rev 3.1 with AM3+ so it can run a Piledriver CPU. Linus compared it with an i5-3570K Ivy Bridge at LGA 1155. LGA 1155 from Gibabyte begins with the H61 chipset and there is no FDD connector natively on board. I don't only want to replace 4 PCs with one, they all have also 4 different OEM's on it so it is better to have FDD natively onboard to find drivers than ball around to find a USB FDD that fit to all OEM's. Linus told us at an TechQuicky Video that Intel stopped supporting FDD natively in their Chipsets around 2006 and at that date they disappeared at Intel boards right at that time but on AMD based Motherboards you can find it till 2011. So X58: no. Industrial boards may have it but it is even harder to find drivers for this without contacting the producers of this boards. Dell, well is Dell. Don't try something with a Dell board that Dell don't want and Dell T3500 or HP Z400 is Intel Xeon and HP Z600 is dual Intel Xeon. I didn't find an HP D20 but it all sounds like special stuff with 6 core Xeon.

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/de/Motherboard/GA-890FXA-UD5-rev-31#ov

 

The 890FXA UD5 is a normal consumer board which can run an AMD FX 8370 8 cores (not 9370 because it has 220W TDP) right out of the box with all the stuff I need but please: it's a Gigabyte board. Is there any equal motherboard available from ASUS or MSI?

 

Please don't misunderstand me wrong. Pulling out a zip Drive and install an CD Rom is easy but making the machine understanding that there is something else like this is massive! You have to pay a huge amount of money to do this Upgrade to the company that build the machine and it still does nothing else than drilling metal and write a program on your own is like closing all backdoors on Windows on your own. The companies I support have paid for their machines and now the machines have to generate money. Done. And if there is a problem, sure I can solve it with an old computer with Win 98SE on it.

 

I will not virtualize any kind of OEM. That make more problems than it solve at the end.

[mariushm]

Dude, it's cheaper to just search eBay for old motherboards with floppy drive connectors.

 

Yes, they paid for the hardware, but you can argue it costs them more in hours of your time than it costs to buy mb, ram and cpu...

 

Not sure about Asus or MSI, but Asrock for example may be a good option for you. They had more quirky boards in the past and you may still be able to find those boards with floppy on eBay

Also, they have a very easy to browse list of boards here: https://www.asrock.com/mb/index.us.asp#AllProduct

 

For example for socket AM3+ looking from oldest chipsets towards the newest

NVIDIA GeForce 7025 based boards: all but 4 models have floppy connector.

760g chipset : 2 boards have floppy

770 both boards have floppy and these were quite common boards ex:

880GM-LE FX has floppy..

 

[atxcyclist]

The short answer is: No remotely recent motherboard is going to have a diskette controller, firewire, and parallel ports built-in. There's no use in getting upset that there are almost no options, you're basically looking for a unicorn. Serial connectors are one thing, but the rest of that stuff is very antiquated tech at this point.