I recently purchased a Dell FDDM-101 for that very purpose. It is a laptop drive, but it has a mini-USB port on it that allows external use. It reportedly is one of the few USB floppies that can do so, but I have not yet tried it. As far as cleaning, I think that cleaning diskettes are your best bet. On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 10:00 AM John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hey folks, two asks -- I'm looking for advice:
Are there any USB or external floppy drive arrangements that are flexible like internal floppy drives for allowing formatting and/or reading of unusual sector sizes or formats?
Ex: 800KB Atari ST floppies and PC DOS disks formatted in unusual sizes
..
Second question is -what is the easiest way to clean the heads on a 3.5" floppy? If I have a bunch of 'suspect' floppies that I want to clean the head between every disk it seems a little painful to disassemble the drive enough to see the heads and clean. Are there any alternatives?
(I'm used to 5.25" drives where there's often enough space in there to wipe without disassembly). Maybe there's a good (modern) source of 3.5" cleaning floppies?
(P.S. I have a K6-3+ PC I can put a fresh OS on so I may be cleaning a legacy 3.5" drive instead of a USB floppy).
Thanks! John