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Comment by hexmiles | Hacker News Reader

from experience, most of those are really not that great, they tend to have a lot of problem reading disk and often refuse to even acknowledge the presence of a disk that my other devices (i keep a couple of old computer around for this purpose) read fine, and they don't always support lower density disk. I highly recommend ibm usb disk drive, they work much more reliably and you can find them for very reasonably price (i bought 10 of them), also they support more formats.

But if you want to read floppy from home computers (and the various format/disk layout that they use) the only solution that i found is KryoFlux or Greaseweazle.

If someone know of others "modern" floppy disk controller please share.

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There's also the FluxEngine: http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/

(I use it as it has support for reading and writing 800KB Mac disks, which would otherwise require a special floppy drive that can change the rotation speed).

This right here. 2 parts and no OS.

I recently got the parts but haven't tried it yet. I have vinatge machines that otherwise need a real floppy controller and not a modern one (nothing found on any motherboards newer than 486's), or a catweasel (also no longer made) or a KryoFlux (the nuclear option and not open source).

Greaseweasel (https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle) has come along recently as an open source catweasel. (the pcb design files are there too, just buried away in a zip file in one of the wiki pages, not directly in git, so both hardware and software source is aclvailable. Follow Hardware Assembly -> F7 Lightning Plus, scroll to bottom)

But that's more complicated.

I love how the FluxEngine is really just a single off-the-shelf part. You don't even need so much as a wiring/pinout adapter pcb for the 34-pin connector. You can just solder it directly to the dev board.

As soon as they became easily available, I've bought a no name USB floppy and managed to read and store lots of stuff I still had on decades old floppies that I found at home. I could read just about everything, while many more recent CDs and DVDs I had burned years later, some containing important stuff, became unreadable after even 5 years or less. I also lost projects I burned in multiple copies on branded media and stored properly; that made me ditch completely the optical disks on all my computers since like 2006.

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