[vcf-midatlantic] USB Floppies that are flexible? Cleaning a 3.5" drive?

[Dean Notarnicola]

Forgot to mention that a Greaseweazle is also highly recommended for this
scenario. It is exactly why I purchased this the Dell floppy drive. This
combination should let you write most 3.5” diskette images.


On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 10:08 AM Dean Notarnicola <dean.notarnicola at vcfed.org>
wrote:

> 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 at 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
>>
>