Isn't there an USB FDD standard? Why are they using a proprietary protocol instead of that?
It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge
I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.
Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.
If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.
With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.
I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.
It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.
Is grossly insufficient, unfortunately. It has minimal functionality.
There's a lot of floppy drive types and custom floppy formats to deal with.
The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller.
According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.
Soon he decided we needed a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well. But he didn't want to give up having both the 1.2MB and 360KB 5.25 inch drives. The existing floppy controller only supported 2 floppy drives, so he went and bought a new one which supported four floppy drives. The chassis had enough drive bays to fit all three floppies and a 40MB hard disk. We had to make some changes to CONFIG.SYS (maybe an installable device driver??) since BIOS/DOS couldn't detect more than 2 floppy drives by default.