5.25" Floppy Drive Controllers

[Vinay Pundith]

I've spent the last few hours trying to figure out what type of controllers do and don't work with what kind of floppy drives, and am thoroughly confused. I'm looking for a way to get a 5.25" floppy drive (yes, I'm crazy) to work in a modern-ish (supporting a quad core or better CPU) computer. I was running an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard which had support for both 3.5 and 5.25" floppy drives, but it recently died.

 

I've found a couple of options:

- USB to internal floppy adapters. These are plentiful, but they only advertise supporting 3.5" drives. Is this an actual technical limitation, or can a 5.25" drive be hooked up to it as well? (Not worried about physical connector, i have the cable for that). Is there a controller-level limitation that is only compatible with 3.5" FDD's and not 5.25"? I also found a USB 5.25" drive controller that says it is read-only, cannot write to 5.25" floppies regardless of the actual drive connected to it. Why would this be the case?

 

- Motherboard on-board controllers. Some new motherboards (like the AsRock 990FX Extreme4, Z77 Extreme6, and Asrock 980DE3) have onboard floppy headers. The 980DE3 supports 5.25" drives, I know that. But for the others, does anything that supports 3.5" drives support 5.25" drives as well, or not? If not, how would I know?

I read on another forum that any motherboard that has a UEFI BIOS will not support 5.25" drives because 5.25" FDD support was never implemented in UEFI. Is this true? I did notice that the AsRock 980DE3 does not have a UEFI BIOS, and has floppy drive type selection (that includes 5.25"), while the other two have UEFI BIOS'es and do not have any such selection menu (only FDD controller enable/disable). Does anyone know if the AsRock 990FX Extreme4 specifically has 5.25" FDD support?

 

- PCI / PCIe floppy controllers: I can't find any.

 

Does the controller need to have something special to support different kinds of FDDs, and is whatever logic is necessary not built in to the drive itself, like how you can hook a CD-ROM or DVD or blue-ray drive to a SATA/PATA port? And if so, what controllers support what kind of drives?

 

Thanks!!!

[Budget DIY]

I don't have any answers to the questions you've asked. However, I do have a suggestion: look at thrift stores or e-waste recycle plants. They might have ancient hardware for near-free, which could support 5,25 floppy floppydisks natively.

 

Sidenote: I'm also interested into "why". As a person who has used those disks during their teenage years, I hated them with a passion. They br0ke way faster then the 3,5" not-so-floppy disks, while they also still tended to break when I used them. (bought a 2x2x24 CD-rom burner, and just handed in my school homework on a CD-rom, just so it would work)

[Zagna]

1 hour ago, Vinay Pundith said:

- USB to internal floppy adapters. These are plentiful, but they only advertise supporting 3.5" drives. Is this an actual technical limitation, or can a 5.25" drive be hooked up to it as well? (Not worried about physical connector, i have the cable for that). Is there a controller-level limitation that is only compatible with 3.5" FDD's and not 5.25"? I also found a USB 5.25" drive controller that says it is read-only, cannot write to 5.25" floppies regardless of the actual drive connected to it. Why would this be the case?

This person managed to build one?