Memorex 1.44MB USB Floppy Drive (Black)

List Price: $69.15 Discount Price: $27.80

Features:

• Reads and writes universally available, inexpensive 3.5-inch floppy disks
• Connect via included cable to your USB-enabled computer
• Plug and play compatible - no need to install drivers or restart the machine!
• Data transfers up to 11 Mbps
• Blank disks available separately

Customer Reviews:

Easy to add floppy capability [Posted on 2004-03-01]
Many of the newer laptops don't come with floppy drives. Supporting users who require floppy use but have no floppy drive can be difficult. Memorex's 3.5 external USB floppy drive is easy to use, at an affordable price. No software needed (at least not for the latest Windows OS and Mac OS systems.) It was immediately recognized by the system, and useable. (Insert USB cable into system, insert floppy into drive, browseable floppy!)

This product is especially good in that it means multiple people can share the drive as needed rather than wasting space and weight lugging around a laptop with the added feature.

Fast, capable floppy drive [Posted on 2006-12-18]
I got a Memorex USB floppy drive locally and the box is slightly different, but it is probably the same item. For the record, the part number on mine is 3202 3239. With that caveat, I would say that this drive is quite nice (assuming the one shown here is identical). Mine has a built-in USB cable, about 2 foot long. It was recognized without trouble by Windows XP. And the best thing is that it is fast in both reading and writing. While I have not done a careful comparison, I would estimate it is maybe a 2X. I can at least say that my unit is NOT one of those slow internal floppy drives that goes click, pause, click, pause, as it glacially writes a large file, nor rrrwww, click, rrrwww, click as it tries to seek to the file allocation table when accessing multiple files. It acts much more like the 4X floppy I once used in a Sony digital camera (perhaps the speed improvement in this USB unit is simply a result of the USB channel the data goes through compared to the old ribbon cable port on built-in floppy drives...).
The two minor negatives I can think of are that it is a little loud and Windows refused to dismount it when I selected "safely remove hardware" from the task-bar. The former is not an issue in my application and I solved the latter by just pulling the USB cable after waiting for all activity to stop. A few tests of using it again showed that I had not upset the driver. It worked fine.
In summary - it is very capable and I plan to buy another soon for work since we have lots of expensive test equipment that writes screen captures to floppies and I fear that floppies are not long for this world - so I'm stocking up now :-)

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