remotely connect a standard 3.5" 1.44MB floppy 1

[deeptuna]

Hello All and Great Site/Forum,

Looking for a way to remotely connect a standard 3.5" 1.44MB floppy
disk drive approx 75 ft away (maybe distance may be reduced to 25ft) from a
computer. Would prefer a card interface but may in the future may
have (1) serial or (1) ethernet port to work with. Scuzzi (-sp) interface
wont support this distance. What is the max distance for the scuzzi
interface? Has any one tryied this application before? Any ideas or
hints?

Cost is not really an option (sort of) but would like to pick something off
the shelf instead of doing another R&D project.

Best Regards

 

[bpatt]

Here are a few options here for you:

A. USB Floppy or ZIP drive - available now, here's a pair of samples:
USB will allow up to seven devices to be linked together with the cable length in between each to be 5 meters. Simply use USB hubs to get you out to at least 30' (up to seven hops).

B. Firewire connectivity - faster (and more expensive) than USB - distance is about the same. No samples that I know of at this time.

C. SCSI - Ultra-2 SCSI, Wide Ultra-2, and Ultra-3 SCSI all take 8 or more devices, with the cable length up to 12 meters in between each, and this would provide very fast communications. However, you would need some kind of powered SCSI 'hub' or dummy device doing the job every 12 meters. I would want to test this out thoroughly before I relied on it.

D. Buy/build/get another PC, cheaper the better, running Windows 95 (or newer). Share the floppy drive, connect it to the 'backend' PC that needs to see the floppy drive via Ethernet. Distance isn't an issue now, and no hubs or devices to break down / get turned off along the way. Cheap networking!

 

[bpatt]

And here are the samples I promised:

http://www.hp.com/desktops/products/accessories/generated/D9510A.html

http://www.epinions.com/cmhd-Removable_Storage-All-Iomega_Zip_USB_Drive

 

[deeptuna]

Thanks BPatt for the great post,

Its looks like our design is steering towards the USB SCSI interface direction. We have yet to finallize the Computer involved so this is the direction we are looking into.

This is also posted in the Comm & Signal Processing Forum

I will post with the final design iteration.

DT