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Yeah, I want to make use of an IDE floppy drive, which will need to use a SATA adaptor to hook up to the server. I’ll probably be using a Debian-based container, and I’ll need to automatically read the contents of the disk in some way.
I’m kinda assuming this is actually viable, and that I can work along the basic process of using an off-the-shelf IDE-SATA adapter, give it a mount point in the system, then monitor that directory.
I’m still fairly new to Linux, so I’m not aware of all the quirks and astrices that often come up, especially when wanting to do something like this in 2023.
For the curious, I’m building a centralised music system that will serve multiple speakers, including RF. I’ll be managing the music and play lists via whichever modern music server seems the most appropriate, but I thought it would be really neat to use floppy disks as a physical way of selecting playlist, but not exclusively.
All the disks would contain are small ID tokens that represent the playlist on the digital system. The software will monitor the drive, and when a new token is identified, it will simply trigger the playlist to start, presumably via an API call.
Completely pointless, but I like tactile shit and the nostalgia factor!
Floppy drives don’t use IDE, they use their own type of connector ( called a floppy connector), I’ve never seen a Sata to floppy adaptor, but you can connect a usb to floppy adapter to an internal usb header
Yes USB is the way to go, cheap and effective: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002747925791.html
Also the native Linux driver for floppy drives is on its way out: https://itsfoss.com/end-of-floppy-disk-in-linux/ note that USB solutions will still work.
+1 for the internal usb header tip.
I have an ide floppy, ls120 which reads 720k and upwards. No issues under Linux
Wow, floppies.
I would suggest looking for a 3.5" unit rather than 5.25", the small floppies are sturdier.
Even so a floppy can get corrupted at any time so personally I wouldn’t bother with a filesystem and mounting it, I’d just write a bunch of numbers in various places on the disk and attempt to read with dd from several spots.
If you want to go with a filesystem and mount, please be aware that floppy units don’t send a signal when you load a floppy, like CD units do. You just have to try and see if there’s anything in there.
You can use automount to mount a floppy when you access a directory but it’s more trouble then it’s worth imo.
Oh and it also takes a while for the drive to probe and access the floppy (can take 5-10 seconds).
If you want my opinion, I’d do anything except actually having to bother reading floppies. 🙂 I would look into an USB smartcard reader and use smartcards instead.
If that’s not cool enough and you really want to use floppies, I’d conceal an USB NFC reader inside the PC and stick NFC tags to the floppies and load them inside the unit purely for the cool factor, without actually hooking up the floppy drive. Not sure if they’ll be easily readable from inside the drive but I’d try, like I said I’d do anything. 😄
Do yourself a favor and just use a USB floppy drive 👍
From one perspective, it should work; from another I never thought about how SATA/IDE adapters exactly work in this regard. Would any old one work, or most, or (almost) none at all?
Just to add this idea, I’ve used internal floppy drives with USB connection in the past, to attach in systems that don’t have an old style floppy connector.
P.S.: Love the idea! I’m also a great fan of haptic/physical interfaces.
You should be able to get it to automount with autofs and unmount when it hasn’t been read for a certain amount of time. I would suggest mounting the disks read only so they don’t get corrupted it they are removed without unmounting them though.
