YouTuber recreates a floppy disk from scratch

There’s nothing fairly just like the drive to construct one thing simply to see should 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 recurrently 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 information on the disk. In the event you’ve ever questioned why the “save” icon appears the best way it does, it is based mostly on the form of a floppy disk.

To start out, polymatt measured and recreated the disk enclosure and different items in Shapr3D and MakeraCAM, then minimize the aluminum items on a Carvera Air CNC machine. The magnetic disk itself was made by laser-cutting a chunk 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 primary 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 12 months. The US authorities utilizing 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the launch of nukes in 2019.

Polymatt’s venture was an exquisite dive into nostalgic tech and engineering prowess. Perhaps subsequent time he could make a from scratch.