If you never heard of Dynex, you're not alone. They are fast and becoming the new PC components/networking manufacturer. It seems to be a Best Buy brand (or at least, a deal with Best Buy to carry them exclusively). First, I've seen power supplies (300W), 80mm case fans, and thermal grease. We get a huge discount on them as employees, so they are great for us. They are usually cheaper than the brand name counterparts, which is great for the customers, as well.

I bought the USB 2.0 Floppy Drive for the my Compaq 2110US laptop, since these newer laptops do not come with one anymore. It was $54.99 compared to the Smartdisk brand at $59.99. The other big plus was that it was USB 2.0 vs Smartdisk's USB 1.1 (though I don't know if you'd notice, seeing that a floppy transfer never exceedes 1 MB/sec).

Well, the intro is all and well, but lets get to the product at hand.

External Drive
It looks pretty good - it's black, and the USB cord is built-in. The cord is about 1.5 ft long (not too short, not too long). It's not a standard 3.5" desktop floppy drive adapted for external use. It's a notebook floppy adapted to external use (so it's slimmer). The eject button is at the top left corner, and the activity LED is at the bottom right corner. The eject button protrudes when a floppy disk is inserted. You push the protruding eject button to mechanically eject the disk.

Installation
Installation was a breeze with Windows 2000 and XP. I inserted the USB connector on both computers, and both quickly recognized the floppy drive, and assigned it a drive letter (A: on both accounts).

What's amazing is that my Compaq Presario 2110us laptop, as well as my home-built PC using a Gigabyte 8KNXP i875 motherboard detected the drive upon boot up, and will even BOOT FROM THE DRIVE without any configuration on the user's part! On the Compaq side, however, it complained that it was not a high-speed USB port, and that I may get reduced speeds while using this device. Let's bust out laughing, shall we? :) Seriouslly, though... this truely means that the USB translator is a USB 2.0 part, and that the box is not lying. However, as I said before... with a floppy drive, does USB 2.0 really help? Read more to find out.

Now, on my older Windows 98 machine, I had to use the bundled driver CD to install the USB 2.0 floppy driver before it recognized it as a B: drive (it already has an internal floppy drive assigned as drive A:). The older Pentium II board that utilized the Abit BH6 i440BX motherboard did not fare well in the boot-up test. It simply did not recognized the USB floppy drive. Fortunately, updating the firmware of the P2B proved sucessful in getting the drive to be recognized (and booted of off). This also requires a trip to the BIOS setup to configure USB Floppy as a boot device.

Performance
Using HD Tach 2.61, the resulting graph was like riding the Six Flags Great America ride "American Eagle", were there were many hills, crests, drops ... all seemingly erratic and random. The average throughput was calculated at 35.1 kb/sec. Random access was timed at 280.6 ms. And the burst read speed was a pathetic 0.1 mbps. CPU utilization was a healthy 0.7%! USB 2.0 bandwidth is definately not utilized. To summarize in a typical chart fashion:

Max throughput: 42.0 kb/sec
Min throughput: 15.2 kb/sec
Avg throughput: 35.1 kb/sec
Burst Read : 0.1 mbps
CPU Utilized : 0.7%

Recomendations
Yes.















Oh, you wanted more?

If you're in need of a floppy, don't hesitate on the Dynex brand just because you never heard of it. I've already used several of their products (and surprised that even ePinions have them listed), and will be reporting back on them shortly.

Performance-wise, it's on par with an internal drive (except that the graph is a bit more steadier and linear - hmmm...).

Price-wise, it's cheaper than the competition.

Ease-of-Use-wise, it's plug-n-play.

Coolness-wise, it's a floppy drive. It's techie cool, but not really.

Retro-wise, it's a throwback to the 80s to the late 90s.

And there you have it.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 54.99
Operating System: Windows