So who makes floppy drive read/write heads? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 03:03:32 pm
content: USB floppy drives are still made, so someone has to be making r/w heads, or where billions made in the '90s and someone bought them all?I've only found specialized magnetic stripe reader head manufacturers, that's all. Those are more like audio tape heads than digital heads.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 04:48:39 pm
content: Honestly, I kinda doubt anyone is actually still making floppy drives any more. I cannot find them from any name brands, just countless no-name brands selling external USB units, none of which is likely to be making the actual drive mechanisms. (There were never that many companies making the mechanisms, and IIRC Teac was the last one standing, but they don’t make them any more. Or if they do, it’s not something they advertise.)My hunch is that supplies are dwindling and will eventually run out. We probably just haven’t yet because nobody is buying them.Consequently, I doubt anyone still makes the heads, and I suspect they were made in-house by the drive manufacturers.

author: AndyBeez
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 05:11:09 pm
content: I agree with @tooki - floppy drives are a dead format. No one is producing volume parts for FDDs. Not even North Korea.The only FDDs I've seen are new old stock. There are FDD simulators which are a SD card reader in a 3.5inch floppy disc form factor. These are often used in music equipment from the 1990s - equipment that still rocks, but the Midi record to 3.5inch floppy just sucks now! One simulator even makes the 'buzz' of the floppyI wager somewhere in the past 20 years, the last stocks of mag heads went into landfill as it was just uneconomic and pointless to hold them. If you need a specific model or type, try the vintage computer sellers who might have a cache of retro parts. But really, finding a matched 2SA/2SB transistor pair for a 1972 eight track is more likely.A decade ago I sold a stack of pristine never used FDDs on ebay because they had been surplus since 2000. They went somewhere; bets most are sat still unused after having been resold or swapped.

author: Sal Ammoniac
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 06:15:17 pm
content: I have a USB floppy drive for one reason only: to access old files I haven't gotten around to copying to modern media yet. I haven't bought blank floppy disks in over 25 years. I suspect that the vast majority of people who still have a working floppy drive fall into this category.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 08:04:11 pm
content: I have some USB floppy drives that I use frequently, I have several oscilloscopes and other instruments that have floppy drives to transfer data. I also have a collection of vintage computers and I have bought NOS floppy discs within the past few years. I know I am part of a tiny minority though.

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2022, 09:27:39 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on August 26, 2022, 08:04:11 pmI suspect there is quite a lot of us with working vintage systems include the floppy drives which are important to the collection. I have a lot of old 8-bit Atari and although I have an adapter that emulates SIO peripherals I still have 810 & 1050 floppy drives. Most issues are the disks rather than the drives. Parts when I have needed them have been from donor drives, I don't think I have ever bought NOS parts for floppy drives.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 30, 2022, 07:12:22 pm
content: I guess I mean USB floppy drives are still sold, are they still made today? "They" still make audio cassette decks and someone is making the heads. I know because I bought a cheap USB cassette deck and the head looks like garbage, nothing at all like during the peak of the early 1990s. So someone has a factory going.I just wonder who is making, or used to make. floppy disc read/write heads. Information is surprisingly hard to find, at least for me, perhaps I need better keywords.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 12:06:33 am
content: Aren't they fundamentally similar to the heads used in hard drives? They used to be, I'm not sure how much things have changed in modern times. Perhaps the same companies that make hard drive heads make/made floppy heads? Do hard drive manufactures make their heads in house?

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 12:46:15 am
content: Totally different, for one thing floppy disk heads make full contact, for another they use induction for reading and writing, there were never magnetoresistive read heads for normal floppies. (Maybe flopticals and Zip disks but I don't really call these "floppy" anymore).What I find baffling is just how much information I can find about hard disk heads, but practically nothing on floppy heads.Just another one of these "itch I can't scratch" things for me...

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 01:12:37 am
content: Perhaps it's because floppy technology was waning by the time the internet was becoming mainstream while hard drives are still mass produced and widely used even today? Most of the development of floppy drive tech occurred before the modern internet was a thing.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 01:13:26 am
content: I don't think that any manufacturer has sold repair parts for floppy disks drives at least since the early 1980s. Even at about $300 each (in mid 1970s dollars), the drives were simply not worth repairing. It also took special alignment disks, special drive controllers, oscilloscopes and special training to align disk drives. Back in about 1977 I was repairing removable cartridge drives and I have never talked to anyone that has worked on disk drives professionally since that time frame.I was working for a large aerospace company in the early to mid 1990s when they threw out all of their disk drive parts, heads, alignment disks and the controllers. I rescued a lot of the stuff from the trash heap and still have some of it but I think that I eventually threw out the heads and other repair parts.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 04:52:30 am
content: I suspect some tiny factory in China is still making them in low volume, possibly alongside cassette and magstripe reader heads (the latter two being extremely similar).

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 06:06:19 am
content: I doubt it. There’s practically no market for them (nobody is particularly nostalgic for floppy disks, even in retro computing), but above all, unlike with cassette decks (where cheap manufacturers existed alongside expensive name brands), during the floppy heyday, only major companies, mostly Japanese, made them (Sony, Matsushita, Teac, Mitsumi, NEC, Alps, Samsung, Epson, Citizen, etc). I’ve never heard of a true no-name floppy drive mechanism, so there would be no such company to continue manufacturing. Not saying they definitely didn’t exist, but I’ve never come across it.I suppose it’s possible a major company sold off its tooling when exiting the market, but who knows.As I said above: the number of 3rd party drives has been reduced to almost zero, they’re all the same item rebadged, with my suspicion being that they’re using up drive mechanisms bought in bulk.Floppy heads and cassette/magstripe heads are nothing alike. It’s unlikely there’s any real overlap in manufacturers. (And while cassette heads, especially good ones, are a niche product now, magstripe readers are still installed by the millions, even if only as backup for when the chip can’t be read.)

author: Jwalling
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 08:40:04 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on August 31, 2022, 01:13:26 amIn the mid to late 1980's I did a lot of repair work and alignments on 8" Shugart floppy drives. Alignments were done with a special disk that made a "cats eye" waveform on a scope. The bolts holding the stepper motor were loosened and the motor turned till the cats eye was symmetrical.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 04:20:51 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on August 31, 2022, 06:06:19 am

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 05:03:10 pm
content: Quote from: Jwalling on August 31, 2022, 08:40:04 amI had a very small business as a high school student aligning Commodore 1541s that constantly knock themselves out of alignment in normal use...The thing that is bothering me is the failure of the R/W head in Newtronics/Mitsumi mechanisms, which apparently rarely, if ever, happens to the Alps mechanism.Pretty much all 1541-style drives with the Newtronics lever mechanism have r/w head failures. Third party drives, all 1541-IIs, probably the 2031LP, etc.I wanted to know how floppy disk r/w heads are made, what materials are used, the polishing, the gap in the head, etc, so that I could understand why that particular brand fails, and what to do about it. It seems to fail by itself over time.The only information I found was in a textbook about tribology which merely states that the manufacturing process is complex.And patents all the way back to the late 1960s IIRC.edit: 1551 also a "syndrome" drive

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 31, 2022, 06:29:10 pm
content: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/08/31/1742211/japan-declares-war-on-the-humble-floppy-disk-in-new-digitization-push

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 01, 2022, 05:47:02 pm
content: I just noticed the same news article