Smart hack creates the first 128GB 3.five-inch floppy force

Once upon a time, folks who desired to exchange documents didn’t add them to the cloud, send them thru email, or copy them to a USB thumb power. as an alternative, they relied on floppy disks — historical relics that held an increasingly pitiful quantity of information as time wore on, yet, like bedbugs, proved nearly not possible to kill. a couple of agencies tried to introduce replacement products, but neither Zip disks nor SuperDrives should kill the ever present 1.44MB disk.

Geek.com has the story of Dr. Moddnstine, an enterprising hacker who decided to upgrade his historical Aptiva case with a contemporary machine — and hacked a floppy force to create a 128GB garage pool as properly. simply when you notion it become secure to go again to the server room, the 3.5-inch zombie rides again.

This could be completed because — probably by way of danger — the pins on an SD card perfectly align to the individual wires on a floppy drive cable. That made it possible to splice a floppy cable right into a USB card reader. He then bent the touch pins for the reader upwards, so that they’d make contact with an inserted floppy.

This picture suggests the disk pressure with a floppy inserted. you may see the reader making touch with the SD card, which takes place to in shape superbly in the shell of an empty floppy.

The result of this insanity is a floppy pressure which could examine a 128GB disk. There’s a video beneath of the gadget in movement — windows has no trouble detecting a “drive A:”, and because the floppy card reader definitely connects to an internal USB port, the gadget doesn’t want an historic floppy controller to characteristic. The mod is absolutely invisible from the outdoor of the machine, and the Aptiva itself has been turned almost invisibly right into a core i7-6700K Skylake rig, with current ports and capabilities melded seamlessly with the height of Nineties style and engineering. Beige has in no way regarded so… beige.

I wouldn’t need to take bets on how long the gadget will work before the card reader contacts turn away from the mount point and prevent reading the cardboard reliably. but if you’re willing to pop the device open periodically and bend them returned (and all people inclined to do that probably is), it have to function indefinitely. As an delivered bonus, you received’t have to buy a application with 15 of these “disks,” simplest to discover one in every of them failed inside the container earlier than you even unpacked the software. nicely played, Dr. Moddnstine. nicely played.

A full gallery of mod modifications can be seen here, however be warned: The photograph documents are huge and there are dozens, if now not hundreds of them.