Before you call fake, know that both you and this custom built computer are being tricked in two very clever ways.
Those of us who had to deal with floppies will recall that a standard 10cm disc only had about 1.4mb storage after being formatted. However, the metal shutter is exactly the right size to house an SD card. That’s where the increased storage comes from.
As to how a floppy drive is able to read an SD card, that’s where the computer gets tricked. The connector that normally links the floppy drive to rest of the computer has almost identical pin spacing to your average SD, so the unused pins were removed and the remaining ones bent upward to meet the SD once it’s inside the drive, like so:
Super smart, but also might damage your cards after a while (Credit: Gilmour509//Imgur)
For more about the build process watch the teardown video, or browse the other photos of its construction.
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This article originally appeared on Gizmodo Australia
Comments
3 responses to “How To Make A 118 Gigabyte Floppy Drive”
1.4mb? Come on… you guys should know a lot better than to use those nonsensical units. 🙂
Accuracy matters…
You should’ve posted this article 20 years ago, when I was still using Floppy Disks to save all my porn.
Surely a hard disk is the only way to go for porn? The harder the better wink wink nudge nudge say no more etc.
Bugger, the only floppies I have are the 8″ ones.
The fun with having 8″ ones isn’t inserting memory cards, it’s cutting them down to 5.25″ size so the hole is offset. Well, it would be fun, but so few people remember how it was to hold an 8″ floppy in their hands.
Bah, get off my lawn you millenials.