Over the last few years there’s be a large effort by a dedicated few to preserve as much software as possible; this has especially ramped up considering many of those old floppy diskettes – particularly the 5.25-inch kind – are literally disintegrating due to age.
A major problem that those trying to preserve software run into is trying to get images of floppies regardless of format type. Vintage computer enthusiasts would love it if there were a device you could simply plug in a floppy drive to and copy the diskette raw so at least you’d have something for a backup.
Well, such a device exists, and it’s called the KryoFlux.
With the KryoFlux, you power it via USB cord, then plug in the floppy drive directly to the board. From software using a modern PC, you instruct the card to read the floppy diskette then create your mountable image or pull in raw data, and you’ve got your copy regardless of what the floppy format is. This means you can pull and archive data from Apple II, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, MS-DOS and several other floppy format types all with one floppy drive.
Does the card need to be mounted in a PC? No, it doesn’t. You can keep your big 5.25-inch drive and card outside the case and run it that way if you wish.
Do you have write capability as well as read? Yes, you do.
There are two versions of the KryoFlux, basic and advanced. The basic is $139 and the advanced is about $147. This is a small price to pay to archive all the software you paid hundreds of dollars for years ago.
And to note, if you have piles of those 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch floppies that you said you’d archive someday, you’d better get to it quick. Even if you have your floppies stored properly in dust-free cases and in paper sleeves, they’re disintegrating from age. Archive them now while you have the chance, because if you don’t, you’ll lose them.
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If you have an MS-DOS or Windows PC, why not just buy an external USB floppy drive for a lot less (I paid $15 for mine)? Sure, the product mentioned can do more as far as formats are concerned, but if you don’t need those formats, an external floppy drive is better, has the drive included, and doesn’t have to be handled as carefully as a raw PC board.
Very good point, but there’s an equally good reason why you shouldn’t use one of those for data archiving purposes. USB floppy drives are known to be problematic and botch file transfers routinely because they’re built very cheaply and don’t “talk” over USB very well. The KryoFlux has built-in error-checking. If you have a floppy that’s even slightly bad with one of those cheap USB floppy drives, the disk cannot be read. With the KryoFlux, it has technology to overcome that and save your data.
Excellent article.