Floppy Drive Interfaces
Floppy drives are interfaced to the PC in several ways. Most use the traditional floppy controller interface, which is covered in this chapter, but some now use the USB interface. Because the traditional floppy controller only works internally, all external drives are interfaced via USB or some other alternative interface.
USB drives often have a standard floppy drive inside an external box with a USB-to-floppy controller interface converter inside. Newer systems that are "legacy free" don't include a traditional floppy controller and typically use USB as the floppy interface. In the past, some drives have been available in FireWire (IEEE-1394) or even parallel interfaces as well. For more information on USB or the parallel port, see Chapter 17, "I/O Interfaces from Serial and Parallel to IEEE-1394 and USB."
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