Review: TEAC USB Floppy Drive

This rather generic USB Floppy Drive has just arrived for me to review. It's sold by Dainty / ChuangZhiJLB - but it has the same internals as every other floppy drive on the market.

It worked instantly in Linux and MacOS. Shows up as a USB drive. Shove a disk in there and your OS should automagically mount it.

Appears to draw about 500mW in power. The disk read and write speed is pretty good considering the medium. It only takes a few seconds to read the entire disk.

Absolutely no bells and whistles. You get a drive, and a small paper manual. Which basically says "plug it in".

The casing shows P/N: 19308801-19, S/N: U356244 - but inside it's a TEAC. The plastic casing comes off pretty easily with a spludger. There's a screw under the QC sticker - but I only found that out after ripping it open! Ooops!

Inside is a what looks like a pretty old floppy disk. P/N 19307588-21. S/N 9448981. TEAC FD-05HG 8821. Originally from a laptop, I think.

The drive is connected to USB via this little circuit board attached to the ribbon cable.

That's a UF001F USB Floppy converter which costs about ¥20 (£2.50).

For Linux nerds like me, it shows up as 0644:0000 TEAC Corp. Floppy.

Some people have had problems with this device, but it worked perfectly on a modern Ubuntu install.

Full lsusb info is:

Device Descriptor:

  bLength                18

  bDescriptorType         1

  bcdUSB               1.10

  bDeviceClass            0 

  bDeviceSubClass         0 

  bDeviceProtocol         0 

  bMaxPacketSize0        64

  idVendor           0x0644 TEAC Corp.

  idProduct          0x0000 Floppy

  bcdDevice            2.00

  iManufacturer           1 

  iProduct                2 

  iSerial                 0 

  bNumConfigurations      1

  Configuration Descriptor:

    bLength                 9

    bDescriptorType         2

    wTotalLength       0x0027

    bNumInterfaces          1

    bConfigurationValue     1

    iConfiguration          0 

    bmAttributes         0x80

      (Bus Powered)

    MaxPower              500mA

    Interface Descriptor:

      bLength                 9

      bDescriptorType         4

      bInterfaceNumber        0

      bAlternateSetting       0

      bNumEndpoints           3

      bInterfaceClass         8 Mass Storage

      bInterfaceSubClass      4 Floppy (UFI)

      bInterfaceProtocol      0 Control/Bulk/Interrupt

      iInterface              0 

      Endpoint Descriptor:

        bLength                 7

        bDescriptorType         5

        bEndpointAddress     0x82  EP 2 IN

        bmAttributes            2

          Transfer Type            Bulk

          Synch Type               None

          Usage Type               Data

        wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes

        bInterval               0

      Endpoint Descriptor:

        bLength                 7

        bDescriptorType         5

        bEndpointAddress     0x01  EP 1 OUT

        bmAttributes            2

          Transfer Type            Bulk

          Synch Type               None

          Usage Type               Data

        wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes

        bInterval               0

      Endpoint Descriptor:

        bLength                 7

        bDescriptorType         5

        bEndpointAddress     0x83  EP 3 IN

        bmAttributes            3

          Transfer Type            Interrupt

          Synch Type               None

          Usage Type               Data

        wMaxPacketSize     0x0002  1x 2 bytes

        bInterval             127

Not the world's most exciting bit of tech, but handy for recovering anything from old disks.

Thanks to @Gas_Liverpool for sending me some old floppies!