There are times when one technology goes away almost overnight like a jolt of smoke, and others when it fades slowly over time where their departure is rarely noticed. So with this removable media, even though we sometimes have USB flash disks or SD cards, they don’t come anywhere near their number or the ubiquitous past floppy, zip disk and CD-ROM. If the floppy disk is just a save icon, you still have the opportunity to feel their retro charm, courtesy of [Franklinstein]. He has created a 3.5 ″ floppy disk that avoids 720 k, 1.44 M, or even 2.88 Mb and runs everywhere with the claimed 512 GB capacity. We’re sure we can’t remember the day before!
Of course we can see in the video below that he did not achieve a remarkable feat of data compression, nor did he achieve the hemorrhagic method of storing bits in individual iron oxide molecules. Instead the floppy hinge is open, and there’s a holder for the microSD card where the disk itself will be. It’s a bit of a joke, and we have to agree with him that it makes for a very simple container for microSDs that can carry so much data. This makes us wonder if it would be possible to multiplex 14 micro SDKs in a microcontroller on a PCB that could fit in a floppy shell. Perhaps an ESP32 could be a slow file server through a web interface?
He said the 512GB floppy would comfortably surpass the height of tall buildings if they were stacked together, so at least it represented a space saving. If you’re looking for something a little more functional and don’t mind changing the drive, there’s always this classic method for marrying a floppy with an SD card.