YouTuber recreates a floppy disk from scratch

There’s nothing fairly just like the drive to construct one thing simply to see in the event you can. got down to create a floppy disk drive, the favored storage medium of yesteryear, from scratch, as a result of why not. For anybody born too late to have often used one, a floppy disk is a magnetically coated, versatile polyester disk encased in a protecting shell. Insert it right into a floppy drive, and a magnetic head reads or writes knowledge on the disk. In the event you’ve ever puzzled why the “save” icon appears the way in which it does, it is based mostly on the form of a floppy disk.

To begin, polymatt measured and recreated the disk enclosure and different items in Shapr3D and MakeraCAM, then reduce the aluminum items on a Carvera Air CNC machine. The magnetic disk itself was made by laser-cutting a bit of PET movie and coating it with a suspension of iron oxide powder. After assembling all of the elements and some touch-and-go moments, he was truly in a position to magnetize the floppy disk and write to it, albeit at a really fundamental degree.

We declared the in 2010, and within the years since then even people who clung on the longest have deserted it. The lastly mentioned goodbye to the floppy disk in 2024, and the German Navy moved on from the format in the identical yr. The US authorities utilizing 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the launch of nukes in 2019.

Polymatt’s mission was a beautiful dive into nostalgic tech and engineering prowess. Possibly subsequent time he could make a from scratch.