Why are 5 inch USB floppy drives so uncommon?

You vastly underestimate the production gap between those two drive types. There were likely at least a couple of orders of magnitude more 3.5" drives in use in their time than 5.25" drives were in theirs. I remember my last 5.25" drive costing ~2x more than a 3.5" drive in the mid-90's. Also, widespread 5.25" drive usage ended 10-15 years before 3.5" drives were superseded by flash.

3.5" was also the last widely used removable magnetic disc and used by virtually everyone for a time for backups, in all kinds of industrial devices etc the way microSD cards are today. Sure, there were Zip disks etc. but those were typically add-on devices and had a degree of compatibility issues vs 3.5" drives which were standard equipment for well over a decade whether you wanted them or not. So the majority of computer users from that era (as well as any still in service equipment) are most likely to still have, and possibly need replacements for, 3.5" drives since they most likely switched over long ago and have been a rapidly dwindling replacement market vs 5.25" which was pretty much dead by the early 90's.

5.25" floppies were on their way out in the mid 1980s, USB was born in the late 1990s and 3.5" disks were still around and in high use then. It's a generational thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History

The same reason there aren't Apple, Amiga, or Android branded Morse code keys.

The 3.5" drives had no practical disadvantages as compared to 5.25" drives, so the 5.25" units really declined in popularity and were EOL'd in most cases long before 3.5" drives disappeared. IIRC the interfaces and pinouts were different too.

I would imagine that for many people, they moved any valuable data on 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks during the roughly decade of overlap of the two drive types.

I doubt there is enough of a market demand for legacy 5.25" disks where the data doesn't already exist on other mediums to make it worthwhile to offer any kind of modern interface.

I've got a few in my basement ... my email is in my profile and if you'd like one, send me your shipping address. As a note, I'm about to throw out a huge pile of legacy electronics (I believe I have over half a ton going to the recycling facility so if there's a broad interest in old hardware, I could put together a list for the community.

I'm going to part out an old Sun E450 and use the chassis and power supplies for a 40 node Kubernetes cluster. There are 20 7200 RPM 18GB SCSI drives in there as well as four CPU/memory units.

Almost everyone who had 5.25" media already converted it to 3.5" in the 90s.

My first computer was 5.25" only, but when I built my second computer I put in one of those fancy new 3.5" drives along with a super fancy dual 5.25" and 3.5" combo drive. One of the first things I did was back up all my 5.25" disks to 3.5" and also copy them to the fancy hard drive I had in the new computer.

Going from having 2 5.25" drives to having a hard drive and and 3.5" drive was an explosion in storage space and it just didn't make sense to keep using the 5.25" disks, especially given their high failure rates.

Everyone I knew at the time did the same thing. 3.5" was vastly superior in storage and reliability (as long as you knew how to fix the springs in the metal covers on the disks).

Part of the issue is that while USB and 3 1/2" floppies overlapped for some time, the 5 1/4" floppy was already long dead by the time USB was introduced. I wouldn't be surprised if the 3 1/2" USB floppy drives you buy today are basically the same design developed in the late 90s. They're so cheap because they've been made the same way for decades now.

The 5 1/4 USB drive is bespoke hardware, which is why it is so expensive. I'd imagine it has a more software described interface so it can handle the galaxy of incompatible sectoring and formatting standards used by different companies back in the day. It used to be that if you formatted a floppy on one computer it was not likely to work on any other brand of computers. Having the formatting details be in software/firmware would make the drive far more useful for historians.

Not what you're asking for, but hey, this device http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html is different from the standard USB floppy adapters.

Standard is named UFI, spec at https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbmass-ufi10.pdf

UFI does not provide actual low-level access to the drive. It only support a few common floppy formats, like 720kB, 1440kB and therefore not 1.2MB or 360k of the 5.25 inch floppies.

I sense an assumption that both sizes are equally likely to be required and available. That's quite untrue. 5.25 floppies immediately vanished from the market when 3.5 became available. That was a long time ago. So you have the entire lifetime of 3.5 disks elapsing after the demise of 5.25. We're now roughly 20 years after the demise of the 3.5 disk so both demand for and availability of the older 5.25 is very low.

Why do you think the "the difference in demand alone can't explain this gap"?

5.25" floppy disks are more likely to suffer physical damage at this point in history than a 3.5" disk. This would also contribute to the supply-demand curve biasing to 3.5" (on top of the ubiquity argument)

3.5" have a more durable design - the hard plastic, the spring loaded shield and, most importantly, the center disk that rested on the enclosure housing that prevented the magnetic medium from sagging.

When 5.25" disks are stored on end, they sag over time causing them to physically be unreadable. You have to store them flat. 3.5" are (mostly) resistant to this sag and therefore will be more likely to survive long term.

3.5" disks were in use partially into the 2000s and didn't really disappear until rewriteable flash media became common, cheap, and well supported among operating systems--which is about the time when Windows XP more or less took over 9x as the most common consumer OS.

5" disks were well on their way to being rare in 1990. I'd wager no system after the Pentium came out (and probably earlier, like maybe '92 or so) had a built-in 5" drive unless carried over from an older system.

in a similar vein, I love those mini CDs but they seem to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth. It's a shame, they were super cute.

I've been looking into this and it's straightforward-ish.

The greaseweazle is a new fairly low cost disk controller, and you can couple that with a 5.25" enclosure for a CDROM/DVD.

The cheapest way is to buy an old full size external CDROM/DVD drive, then scavenge the case.

The amount of data on 5.25" disks which is also in standard PC formats means that a standard USB-mass-storage implementation would have limited use.

There are plenty of archival-quality solutions which perform low-level flux imaging of the media, and these do operate over USB. Because the 5.25" media saw application in tons of non-PC applications, and this is the kind of controller you need to do useful work with them.

More info here: https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disk...

Likely because the number of 3.5" drives shipped was on the order of 100-1000 times greater than 5.25" drives. There are still obscure devices shipping which use 3.5" drives.

I'll speculate. Companies started making these things in the late 90s, when it made sense. In 2020, it might make sense to keep selling drives. But nobody would start making and selling these drives today.

A few things happened around the turn of the century: USB came in, 3.5" floppies went away, and laptops started to replace desktops for more people. 3.5" was clearly not the future, but customers had lots of recent work and data on them, that they needed to access from their new computers.

The likes of Apple and Sony sold 3.5" USB drives with their new laptops (for way more than $10!). At some later point, Apple and Sony's customers had moved on, but the ecosystem of parts vendors, remaining customers, sellers etc would've been enough for the cheap generic vendors to move in.

What happened instead with 5.25"? I'd say: the market was smaller, because 10 years of growth hadn't happened yet. The market was much more fragmented, most computers/OSes couldn't read disks written on another vendor's system. There were fewer pieces of $$$$ equipment (synthesizers, industrial controllers) that embedded them. And finally, the 5.25" -> 3.5" transition was pre-USB and pre-laptop, so desktop users just bought desktops with two non-portable drives using the native disk interface.

I have a BBC Model B and a BBC Master, both with 5¼" drives. They were used a lot in British schools, and hung around into the early 1990s -- schools had invested in software for them, but didn't have the budget to replace them.

My dad had an IBM 286 clone, which is the oldest computer I can remember using (Captain Comic!). That had both 5¼" and 90mm¹ floppy drives, but we almost always used the latter.

All these machines were very expensive at the time, and not very common for home use. Are there any popular old computers (Commodore, Amiga, Mac etc) that used a 5¼" drive? My impression is everything was on cassette, until 90mm drives became cheap enough for home use. (Even the BBC machines sold for home use usually used cassettes; the disk drive was a separate, expensive purchase -- double the cost of the computer itself!²)

¹ Yes, I'm that much of a metric purist.

² http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/BBCBI3....

Wondering about the price for the 8" version.

There's no money in it. They couldn't sell enough to justify the costs of designing and building them.

3.5" drives came about as the home computing & internet movement was just starting to take off. Computers adopted the newer more compact technology just as there was an explosion in demand for computers. Their popularity then meant that legacy support needed to continue longer as well.

I don’t see 5.25” disks since C64. All the PCs I have seen since 1990 had 3.5” drives, and that was the PC boom time. I doubt that there are a lot of 5.25 disks around, as many would have been converted already to 3.5”.

On the contrary, I (40yo) own some 3.5 floppies (a couple of old big box pc games).

I would guess because 3.5” disks were prominent in PCs for much longer than 5.25” disks. When USB was introduced, it would be common for the PC to include a 3.5” disk drive but 5.25” had been out of favor for some time by then.

On top of that it was common for drivers to be included on 3.5” that came with hardware, even for server grade hardware, this persisted for a long time. It was not uncommon even in the late 2000s for rack mount servers to include floppy drives for this reason.

Lastly, because of their size 5.25” disks were rarely included in laptops and portables once 3.5” disks became available. Having 3.5” disks being prominent in laptops led to many miniaturized versions of the 3.5” mechanisms which translate well into a USB peripheral form factor.

In addition to all the other reasons, 5.25" floppy disks were genuinely 'floppy' and easily damaged by wear and tear, so there are far fewer of them around in sufficiently good condition to be worth trying to read.

Might as well ask why there are no 8" ones.

I dont have a working 5.25" or 8" floppy drive anymore; I wouldn't trust the 3.5" i have.

imo floppy drives found in the field today, if working at all, are likely to only speak to themselves and not share media with another drive due to age and alignment issues. maybe one could detune a new drive to match an older ones quirks if necessary.

I think the better approach is to treat reading the media as a one time recovery and then emulate the drive electrically; if you're working with an actual 5" disk somewhere. IIRC there's arduino boards that pretend to be a floppy drive and serve sd card images.

Yeah, well try and find an 8 inch floppy drive and USB controller... ;)

Also remember that popular home computers often went from say ZX Spectrums (Cassette) to Amiga/Atari ST (3.5 floppy) - so there was no intermediate 5.25 floppy stage.

Depends on the system(s) you are talking about.

For the Commodore 64/128, there are multiple modern solutions using both USB and even microSD that emulate 5.25" floppy drives. My personal favorite, while not cheap, is the Ultimate1541. Over the years, due to its FPGA base, it has grown from a 5" drive emulator to way, way more.

It's a shame, I really liked the "clong" sound the handle made when you locked the 5.25 floppy disk in the drive.

IIRC 5.25 and 3.5 floppies had same amount of storage (in fact 3.5 a bit more). Combined with the fragility and size of 5.25 floppies (you couldn't just put it in your shirt pocket), they lost interest

It looks like 5 1/4” drives themselves are getting quite rare, not many on eBay, while there are lots of 3.5”. So even with a controller, getting a drive is not simple.

I’d say the main reason, is that 3.5” drives are much more common, and they overlapped USB They are much more standard than 5 1/4” drives too.

Surprised nobody mentioned iMacs. They were the first major desktop without a floppy drive but they did have USB. The first accessory for most was either a floppy or Zip drive.

Where are you seeing $10 usb/floppy drives?

Id be ashamed if I was caught with a 5 inch floppy