Floppy Drive Hides SD Card Reader

[gilmour509] posted a thorough gallery of a new custom-built computer and case made to look like a 1995 IBM Aptiva. While the whole build is impressive, the most clever part involves a 3 1/2″ floppy disk that hides an SD card and works like a regular USB flash drive when inserted into the floppy drive.

He makes use of the fact that floppy disk edge card connectors have the same spacing as SD cards. Add in a hacked USB card reader, some careful cutting and assembly, and [gilmour509] has a very convincing floppy drive with gigabytes of space.

When inserted the light turns on and windows recognizes the drive.

The best part is that with everything put together, the floppy disks and floppy drive look completely unmodified. He even made the file explorer icon show a floppy drive.

The faux-Aptiva gallery includes the full build, but skip to about 2/3 down to see the floppy SD card section.

Skip to 16:50 to see how the SD cards can be inserted and removed from the modified floppy disks.

Thanks [azide] for the tip

23 thoughts on “Floppy Drive Hides SD Card Reader

  1. Quote: “floppy disk edge card connectors have the same spacing as SD cards”.

    0.1″ pin headers also have the same pitch you can us a 9×2 pin header in a bread board.

    I noticed a couple of other things in electronics have a 0.1″ pitch :-]

      1. 0.100 in [ 2.5mm ] as to be interchangeable with .098 (“point 098″) pitch when controlling dimensions are metric.

        I’ve even seen this referred to as 3/32” – but that’s not even funny!

  2. Cute for effect but, you can now get from China a thingy that the floppy cable mates to and it has a USB jack on front (fits in the bay) and the host of that floppy don’t know it’s the twenty-first century. They are great on classic keyboards of the musical type.

    1. Got to ask, what is this.
      I’ve got some older tds3014 scopes with floppy drives, and would LOVE to be able to cheaply convert over to SD, flash, or USB drive, anything better than floppy.

      1. Google image search for “usb floppy drive replacement” turns up several. (I only used hard disk emulators using SD cards, to build clusters from computers that did not support booting from USB.)

    1. Why? You can emulate it, DOSBOX etc.

      That said I was thinking when I woke up how nice the Internet was back in 486 days. Web pages that didn’t spy on you or take over your computer. Made by amateurs, largely, rather than media arseholes at giant corporations. And Usenet was thriving! Every ISP had Usenet. And a 28K modem.

      I’m half convinced to start my own Internet. With no hookers or blackjack.

      1. DosBox isn’t doing a very good job for many games, and nothing beats the original CRT monitors and original keyboards with n-key rollover for multiplayer.

        Try playing classics like Triplane Turmoil or Liero, or MoleZ on Dosbox… it just doesn’t work the same. Sounds are off, weird speed, graphics scale wrong, crashes… and of course the multiplayer keys are jamming.

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