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[on:]

I need to power a floppy drive for a project. Currently, I have an ATX power supply powering it, but any five volt source will do, so I'm going to be switching to something smaller. The issue is, I don't know how to connect to the floppy power pins. Here is an image of how it looks:



The pins circled in blue are power pins. I only need two pins, the 5V and the ground pins. Is there anything like a 4 pin female to female connector that will allow me to turn this male power setup into a female one, so I can easily attach some wires to the pins? I tried searching, but I couldn't find anything.

[Reply #1 on:]

The connector is a mini-Molex, the easiest way to get one is to cut it off an old ATX power supply.

Are you sure your drive uses only 5V? Most drives used to need the 12V pin to power the disc motor while the 5V was used for the electronics. And keep in mind the drive is allowed to use as much as 2A from the 12V and the 5V pin (resulting in 34W of power).

[Reply #2 on:]

Ok, thanks. I think I have some of those that I can cut off.

I've seen various sources around the internet say it's 5V (this is the 3.5" drive not the 5.25" one). Which would mean it would only use 10 Watts at 2A? And do you have any sources that show it really uses 2A?re'

EDIT: Here's the spec for a random 3.5" floppy drive I found online (http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/SAMSUNG-SFD321B-070103.pdf), and if you look on page 9 (section 2.4) you can see that it uses between 0.3 and 0.7 amps depending on the operation. I'm only going to be controlling the stepper motor (no reads or writes). I'm not sure how much current an Arduino can put out, but 0.7A might be too high... I'll look for some other 5V power source.

[Reply #3 on:]

I don't know what your drive really needs but the connector has to supply 12V with 2A max and 5V with 2A max as by the specification. Have you tried to feed it with just 5V and does it work then?

My (old) drives use both voltages maybe your's are different. Theoretically it should be noted on the case what it draws from which voltage line.

[Reply #4 on:]

Depending on what you want to do, another way might be to take a USB floppy drive.  You still might need external power to provide the full 5v, 0.5 amp to the drive, but it might be safer than taking some random drive that you might or might not have specs on it.

It wasn't clear whether you were trying to get the Arduino to actually read the floppy, or whether you just wanted to use the motor for something else.

[Reply #5 on:]

I too can't think of anything useful you could do with a floppy drive without also providing the +12 vdc along with the +5 vdc?

Lefty