External Floppy drive for Mac mini

Floppy? LOL!

Why not use a USB stick or something. Seriously.

When you plug in a floppy drive and insert a disc it will mount onto the desktop, typically with a white disk drive icon. You can navigate to the floppy and save to this from within any program via the usual Save… command.

I haven't formatted a floppy on Mac for a few years, but I presume if the disc is unformatted it is still going to give you the option to format it and name the disc. I'll have to find a blank one and try it out on Leopard to see what happens.

Interesting…

There seems to be no way to format an unformatted floppy disc under either Tiger or Leopard. But, even if a disc is pre-formatted in the "PC" format, you can use Disk Utility to "Erase" it to a Mac format (or from Mac format to PC "Fat" format).

I guess that's why they don't sell unformatted floppies anymore. (I did find that I still have a whole bunch of them though, so I going to have to fire up OS9 on one of my older Macs to get them formatted just so I can try to give them away.) 🙂

I did find that once a disc is formatted it does work properly with Leopard.
A quick test with TextEdit to save a document:
1) Choose Save… from the File menu.
2) Type a name for your file.
3) In the "Where" box, choose the name of the floppy disc from the drop-down menu (it will have a white icon next to the disc name).
4) Change the format of the file if you want something other than the default.
5) Click the Save button.

Opening a file works similarly, i.e. Choose the floppy in the Devices section of the sidebar of the Open… Then choose the file within the floppy.