3.5" USB External Floppy Disk Drive Portable 1.44 MB FDD for PC Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7&8 +Dust External Bag Case,Protect your drive Scratch-Resistant,No Need to Install Drive with CD,Plug and Play

I had an old program with a floppy disk that I haven't been able to use. This works great!

easy to use just plug in and the drive did the rest.

I had 4 old diskettes from 1992, which I could not restore with other methods. This device worked like a charm, restoring them all in minutes. No setup required, just connected the device to a windows laptop put in the diskettes and copied the data.

Failed to connect to laptop via faulty USB and then snagged floppy on eject causing unrepairable damage to disk. Complete waste of time and money.

I bought this drive because I have a bunch of old (20+ year) floppies kicking around. One day I decided to see if I could retrieve any information out of them. The only desktop I have with a 3.5" floppy decided to fail to boot, giving me a bunch of failed-memory beep codes when I tried to power it up. So, I bought this drive instead.The good news is that it works. It initializes like any USB flash drive, at least on the Win7 computer I plugged into. It was able to read 4 or 5 of the 40 or so floppies I tried. It made some hellacious clanking noises when I tried to read unformatted or otherwise corrupted disks, but on the few disks I could find that had survived, it worked. It does tend to bog down on some of the more damaged disks. I assume this is because it is powered through a USB port and the motor just doesn't have the torque of a dedicated drive.After going through my stash of floppies, I decided to try repairing my old desktop and trying to read the floppies with its "real" 3.5" drive. I removed and reseated all the memory modules, which brought the old computer back to life, and I started feeding the floppies in one by one. The desktop's floppy drive is faster and quieter, but only marginally more effective on these mangled old disks. It was able to read the contents of a couple of disks that the USB drive gave up on, but the actual files were too corrupted to open or retrieve, so no real net gain.This is a convenient and inexpensive tool to have if you want to retrieve anything from old 3.5" disks, certainly useful for anyone dealing with vintage computers. Now I have to try and find a 5.25" version for my REALLY old disks...