3.5" USB Floppy Disk Drive 1.44Mb, Black - Windows 7 Compatible

We have a semi-professional midi keyboard that only takes 3.5" floppy disks. Today's laptops, don't come with these, so began the hunt for a USB 3.5" floppy drive that would take and format 720k floppies and run on W7. First purchase (from a competitor) provided a useless unit that refused to work. 'Try it in on a machine running XP' came the reply to my complaint that it refused to work - 'I'll work on that'. Having dusted-off my old XP laptop, spend hours. literally, whilst it ran hundreds of updates, I was at last ready to plug the USB floppy drive in. Guess what? Still didn't work. Oh yes it buzzed and farted and reported that the floppy needed formatting (it didn't as it was working in the keyboard nor would it format a new one, I gave-up. Having read the reviews on the 3.5" floppy being offered by SFH Distribution I decided to buy one from them. It arrived, with baited breathe, I plugged it in. It worked immediately, displayed the contents of the disk, accessed it, played a selected track, formatted a new one. It was a pleasure to use. Why had I wasted so much time with the other one?Summary. Don't waste your money on cheaper units. If you want a 3.5" USB floppy drive that really works with plug and play - buy this one!

The drive performs as expected, a bit noisier than I thought it would be but that could be to do with the media itself. For the price, a worthwhile purchase

Great external USB floppy drive. Very useful for installing RAID drivers when building a PC where you want to install Windows on a RAID volume. I have uploaded some photos of this product, which I hope will be useful. The main reason for writing this review however, is to point out that the USB cable is rather short. This is probably as it is expected that the drive will be used with a laptop. Some USB devices, especially those that draw all of their power from the USB port, have trouble working with certain USB extension leads. I can confirm that this drive seems to work fine with the following 1m extension lead.1m USB 2.0 Extension Cable - Premium Quality / A Male to A Female / High Speed 480Mbps

I don't think I received the product I have ordered. Mine looks different then the one described. It came without CD-ROM, it makes a terrible noise when I plugged in and it doesn't work. I will return it. It's a shame. I no more trust what I order I will get. Extremely disappointed. I don't want to give one star but the feedback doesn't show with no star

Bought this floppy drive to access old disks that I had lying about (from early-mid 1990s). The drive plugs in to the PC using USB cable and in windows 7 works perfectly. The disk does not come with any software drivers or controllers (none are needed). I have now made image files of over 30 diskettes and the drive has coped well (720kb and 1.44mb disks). Depending on if you have other virtual drives mounted on your system the drive letter assigned to the floppy may not be a:\ (on my PC it shows up as h:\) This doesn't affect performance, but you have to take it into account when accessing the disk or mounting it in virtual PCs (DOSBOX or Virtualbox). Disk access speed is similar to that of PCs in the 1990s. It appears that this drive can only access diskettes formatted up to 1.44mb. For larger sizes (typically diskettes formatted with FDFORMAT to 1.72mb) the drive cannot read or copy files (you will get an error). In Virtualbox the 1.72mb disk contents are displayed by using dir command, but it has been impossible to access files. Copying files to the drive also works. Good purchase. Recommended for excellent price/quality and delivery.

I am sure that this is a good floppy drive but sadly the claim that it is Windows 7 compatible is not true for I failed to get it to work with this operating system. My previous one did so and then ceased to write to a floppy disc so I do not know if any of the many Windows 7 updates removed the file that enables an external floppy drive to be used or whether the drives themselves are defective. Anyway my cadcam software becomes useless unless I can transfer programs from my computer to my CNC mill. Some programs cannot be written using the "conversational" facility and I am now severely hampered.Charles Corner.

No CD with it so can't comment.

This little drive is perfect for the job. Cheap and cheerful.I suggest plugging it in to a powered USB slot as I don't think it would work on an unpowered slot. Some USB hubs are powered (they have an electrical supply as well as just the USB connection), others are unpowered, any USB slot on your PC etc will almost certainly be powered.I plugged in to a powered hub and in a few seconds the device was available and accessible as the A: drive on my computer, simple and easy.