USB external floppy disk drives

I did a search on floppy drives in the Parallels Desktop for Mac forum, and in general it seems they are a problem. There was even a post from a Parallels employee saying USB drives will not work on a Mac. But none of the posts are truly current.

As it happens, the statement that the drive will not work is not universally accurate.

I just purchased a Teac FD-05PUB USB floppy disk drive. I actually bought the drive to use with my netbook with Win7 Starter. It works fine there, along with XP Pro, Vista Ultimate, and System 9.1. These systems are on genuine hardware, not running in a virtual machine environment.

According to Teac's website, the drive will work with OS X. The outdated brochure says you need to update to 10.2. Today, I got an email from Teac's tech support that said the drive should work with 10.5.8. I'm awaiting a reply as to working with 10.5.9.

I have an iMac, 4gb, with 10.5.8. But, the drive does not show up on the desktop as it should, according to Teac. But, the drive does show up in System Profiler.

So, my theory is the problem is software related. Since PD for Mac interrupts the USB insertion routine, and asks you if you want the USB unit connected to the Mac OS or the guest OS that is currently running, I currently suspect PD for Mac to be the culprit.

I don't want to remove PD for Mac as the test, too much time involved for me. I'd rather take the floppy drive to the nearest Apple store in about a week and a half, plug it in and see what happens.

Can anyone here shed a light on this? Any thoughts as to what else it might be? I'd hate to think the Mac has a hardware problem. Although the stupid little scroll ball on the mouse doesn't work worth a crap! LOL


Ken

 

USB floppy update

The unit is compatible with Snow Leopard, 10.6, this from Teac tech support.

 

USB floppy update

Tested the unit with Snow Leopard, and it works.

That means either there is a bug in Leopard, 10.5, or a conflict with some 3rd party software. The possible bug in the OS has been reported to Apple, but I've received no interest from Apple.