Legacy connectors on modern motherboards

[DOSGuy]

Many modern motherboards don't have (PATA) IDE connectors on them any more, which hasn't worried me very much since you can buy a PCI or PCIe ATA133 card, and the minimal differences between PATA and SATA also allow for cheap adapters. More worrying for me is that most motherboards no longer have a floppy connector, and there are no PCI or PCIe FDC cards or floppy-to-IDE/USB adapters. Note that CatWeasel and KyroFlux are great for grabbing data off of old floppy drives, but they don't allow the operating system to use the floppy drive(s) normally. Startech told me that they have no plans to manufacture a PCI or PCIe floppy disk controller card, so I assumed that my Socket 775 computers would be my last to feature a floppy drive.

The move from traditional BIOS to UEFI definitely had me thinking that floppy drives would not survive into the UEFI era, but apparently they have. This is especially exciting to me because, for many years, motherboards still came with a floppy connector, but only one legacy floppy drive could be recognized in the BIOS. Did BIOS manufacturers somehow save money by not adding support for a B: drive? I'm hoping that support for the second floppy drive is enabled on UEFI motherboards, or could be hacked in.

The disappointing part for me was that the first motherboard I found that had a floppy connector was an ultra-enthusiast Fatal1ty motherboard. Besides the high cost (which I'm willing to pay if I have to), motherboards with this many power phases use way more power under low load conditions; you're really wasting power unless you intend to overclock the crap out of your system, which really isn't my thing. So, my quest began to see how many other motherboards (if any) still have a floppy connector. Below is a list of modern motherboards that have a floppy connector and/or IDE connector. Please help me add to the list!


Socket 1155

Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional	Floppy connector, 1x ATA133 connector	16+8 power
Asrock Z77 Extreme6	Floppy connector	8+4 power

Socket AM3+

Asrock 990FX Extreme4	Floppy connector, 1x ATA133 connector	Digital PWM
Asrock 890FX Deluxe5	Floppy connector, 1x ATA133 connector
Asrock 890FX Deluxe4	Floppy connector, 1x ATA133 connector

[Malvineous]

If you're talking modern PCs, why would you want to use the floppy drive normally? It's a lot faster and more reliable to use virtual disk images. Better to keep your original floppies safe in case you need to use them again one day, or image them properly with a Kryoflux.

Having said that, you can get USB 3.5" floppies cheaply from eBay which behave "normally", in that most motherboards should even let you boot to DOS from a floppy with them.

There is also the XT IDE controller which allows you to connect IDE/PATA hard disks to XT machines over the ISA bus. Not that this will help with floppy disks, but I'm sure it's just the start of the hobbyist community producing new hardware to work with old devices. Give it time and I'm sure there will be new floppy disk controllers produced.

There have been discussions about writing a replacement firmware for the Kryoflux to make it appear like a normal USB floppy to the system, which would allow you to boot from 5.25" and possibly 8" floppies on most motherboards. Most people however are only interested in preserving floppies with the Kryoflux, so there's not a whole lot of interest in writing new firmware. Especially when nobody has really come up with a good use case for this.

Also for the record, PATA and SATA are actually very different communication protocols (SATA is closer to SCSI) but luckily there are a few cheap all-in-one chips that handle translating the command set from one to the other pretty well, leading to the cheap adapters you mention.

[DOSGuy]

That's a fair point. Perhaps at this point a floppy drive only needs to be able to create images from the disks, making the floppy disk a read-only medium. It's cool to still be able to write to them, but they'll fail eventually, so it's important to get the data off of them while we can. I've seen some devices that can be connected to floppy-only computers to allow them to read from and write to virtual disk images.

I'm kind of torn on this one. I guess it's enough that there are devices that let us extract data from floppy disks, and devices that can pretend to be floppy disks. I like that the latest and greatest computers you can buy in 2012 can still read and write to every disk format from floppy disks to Blu-Ray discs, but maybe it's no longer necessary.

[Malvineous]

I agree that it's a difficult one. In my opinion I think floppy drives only belong on older computers that came with them, to give a true nostalgic experience when using them. But a modern PC doesn't really need one in the same way, apart from perhaps the ability to image old disks to preserve them.

The Kryoflux can write images back to blank floppies, so a lot of people want to use that facility to make copies of their originals for use with their old systems (mostly Amiga/C64 in this case.) But even then, it's a lot slower than using a virtual floppy drive (like the ones you mention that read images off SD cards or whatever) and nobody is producing new 5.25" disks any more - maybe not even 3.5" disks - so once the existing ones stop working there won't be much choice.

Of course if you can get a computer that can read floppies and write Bluray, maybe it's worth keeping it. We're getting to the point where people are finding old stuff on 5.25" disks they thought they'd lost, and they want to read it. But 5.25" drives are no longer cheap and plentiful, they've become expensive collectors' items, so reading these disks can be very difficult. Having the hardware to read these old storage formats is becoming quite rare. For this reason I've set aside some old hardware - 8" drives, 5.25" drives, 3.5" drives, old tape drives, MFM/RLL hard disk controllers, etc. so that I can still read all this old stuff and transfer it onto a modern PC. The hard part is picking PCs from the transition periods that have enough interfaces to connect both the old and some new format at the same time!