The Floppy Drive's Last Stand...?
Written: Aug 06 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Simple Install, up and running in minutes.
Cons: Looks tacky
The Bottom Line: It does what it's supposed to and overcomes the potential hazards of getting hardware to work with VirtualPC. Solid enough piece of kit, if you need this sort of thing.
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| adicarter's Full Review: Smart Modular / Apex IMac 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive... |
Some might say Apple were a little premature when they ditched the floppy drive from their iMac range of computers. Sure the floppy disk has pretty much had it's day, many complain that this format is outdated in the respects that it holds precious little information in comparison to today's recordable media. Add to this the fact that floppy disks can often be somewhat unreliable in terms of actually keeping your data safe until you need it. All in all it doesn't bode well for the future of our 3.5" friend.
Still despite the onward march of technology their are still the rare occasions when a floppy drive can be essential as our workplace found out when we needed to transfer small but important pieces of data from our outgoing PC to our new incoming Macintosh system.
Our scenario was related to the fact that we needed to transfer some Microsoft Works files from the older machine and the absence of a networking facility between our computers at the time could have made the task something of a bind.
Luckily the Teac USB Floppy drive was around to come to the rescue.
If you're currently in the market for a new Macintosh system there are often a plethora of bundled deals which include the Teac drive as a freebie extra. That's pretty much how we got ours, additionally the new drives have recently taken a drop in price making the drive an even more attractive option for people who have a need to shift relatively small amounts of data.
The drive itself is pretty much standard size in terms of what you would expect for an external floppy although later revisions have been streamlined even further. As is pretty much the case with many third party peripherals for the iMac the manufacturers have gone all out to integrate the colour scheme to match the translucent 'flavours' of Apple's range. Our drive came in the original electric blue.
Installation of the drive was pretty much the standard fare for USB installations on the Macintosh range. One CD contains the drivers for the Mac and after the traditional 'click on Easy Install' followed by a reboot you are ready to go.
Plug in the drive to one of your Macintosh's spare USB ports and from that point onwards you have access to floppies in the traditional way you used to. From this point onwards the drive performed flawlessly as expected. I transferred files from another older Mac floppy (simple word processing files). The diskette itself was quite old and I had found that other floppy drives had been more than a little choosy in getting the disk to display it's contents. Thankfully the Teac drive provided no problems, the fact that it enabled me to rescue the contents (which weren't backed up anywhere else, slap on the wrist for me!) won it brownie points straight away.
It was after this point I began to use the drive slightly outside it's original intended purpose. I began copying the PC files we needed to floppy disks and promptly booted up the Virtual PC partition on our iMac. I was fully expecting to encounter recognition problems from the PC side of our machine, in the past I have found Virtual PC to struggle on occasion when it comes to recognising hardware that is anything outside what is installed on the machine as standard.
However once again I was pleasantly surprised when the drive showed up fine and dandy in the PC's drive selection. I promptly transferred the files that I needed from disk and within minutes I had everything I needed on the new machine.
So in conclusion what we have here is a piece of hardware that while by no means being essential in today's age still has it's uses. In all honesty the drive gets very little work except on the occasions when you simply must have access to floppy disks. There are also occasions when software installations make use of software 'dongles' which exist on diskette (Cubase being one example). If you are in the same position as myself where I work in a pretty much non networked environment then the drive does make life convenient at times.
In terms of downsides the drive doesn't really have any, it looks pretty cheap and tacky but that's down to Teac's attempt to replicate Apple's tasty colour schemes and whereas Apple have mastered the art of nice looking plastic Teac still have some way to go.
But at the end of the day what kind of gripe is that, you put a floppy in and it works, you can format and erase just like before and the drive does seem to be less choosy than others in terms of reading 'older' disks. Not the most exciting peripheral to review but a solid reliable one which can occasionally get you out of trouble when transferring data.
If you see one at the right money either new or second hand and you think it might be of use to you then I would recommend it. However for those who are bang up to date with their technology then the age of the floppy might have already passed in which case stick with your CD-R's and networking facilities.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
adicarter
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Member: Adrian Carter
Location: Sheffield, UK
Reviews written: 101
Trusted by: 15 members
About Me:
A lifelong fan of anything electronic. If it goes beep, let me see it first!
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