Floppy drives and Ventura

• If they are 400K or 800K floppies, no third-party USB floppy drive will be able to read them. Apple used an IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip to pack on more data than PCs got on corresponding 360K and 720K floppies.
• If they use the MFS filesystem, Ventura will not be able to read them. Apple dropped support for MFS (which has no real subdirectories) long before the first version of Mac OS X came out.
• If they use the HFS filesystem, Ventura will not be able to read them. Apple dropped all support for HFS (no "+") in Catalina.

Basically, if they are 1.44 MB floppies formatted using a Windows filesystem, a modern Mac could still read them – with the help of a USB floppy drive.

Otherwise, if you can't find an old Mac, you're out of luck.

People who still have floppies may need guidance on Appleworks transferring for a modern day.

Not exactly easy, but you'll find some alternatives out there:

AppleWorks for the modern day, a migratio… - Apple Community

Do these floppies contain software or just old data? If just old data, then use one of the older systems which can read those floppies and transfer the data to newer media either through a USB drive in HFS+ format. Such an old Mac may not be able to utilize newer USB drives even if they have an HFS+ volume. You would need to use a smaller size drive since some newer drives no longer have support for 512 byte block/sectors which is what such an old computer will require. Some newer drives may allow for a 512 byte sector option, but not every system can work with that backwards compatibility mode of the drive.

It may be easier to enable File Sharing on that older Mac so you can try to access the files from a newer Mac (will likely need to move those files to an internal volume on the older Mac). I'm not sure it is even possible to have such an old Mac to remotely access a new Mac with File Sharing (newer Macs using the APFS file system cannot share via AFP protocol, and SMB protocols have changed over the years).

If these are software disks, then they will only work on older Macs where the software was supported.

I'm assuming you mean these are from the PPC Macs since I believe they were the last ones to support a floppy drive.

I'm actually surprised the floppy disks still work. I've had much newer ones become corrupted & unreadable.

As long as macOS is managing those drives, then they should work Ok in Ventura assuming they are using at least the HFS+ file system and either a MBR or better yet GUID partition scheme (I'm not sure if the older Apple Partition Map is supported in macOS these days). If you are using some third party software to manage any of those drives, then who knows as it may depend on whether the software is compatible with Ventura.

The only time I've seen any one have issues with older drives working on newer Macs is when attaching them to an Apple Silicon Mac since the Apple Silicon Macs seemed to have a compatibility issue with some older USB chipsets used by those older drives (may not just be USB chipsets, but those drives are more common)....no idea whether a later macOS update or system firmware update ever resolved those issues. There weren't too many reliable details at the time when this was reported in 2020 with the initial launch of the M1 Macs and I've never seen any updates later on one way or the other.

Just make sure to have good backups of any important data on your external drives including those floppy disks. Drives wear out, degrade, and fail...sometimes quite suddenly.

You should use Monterey to update those drives to make sure their HFS plus or another modern disk format before you move on

Additionally, if any of the files on those drives are old, Microsoft Office, formats, new versions of Office won’t open them.

I have some ancient 1.3/1.4 MB HD floppies from the late 1990s that work with the VST Technologies floppy drive that I purchased in 1999 for my iMac DV SE. I can still read (Excel or Word files) from contents of these FAT32 formatted disks using that floppy drive on Ventura 13.4 and my M2 Mac Mini Pro.

If they are 400K or 800K floppies, there are no USB floppy drives you can buy that will read them. (Apple used a special "Integrated Woz Machine" controller, found only in old Apple Macs and Apple floppy drives, to store 400K and 800K where the corresponding PC drives would have stored 360K and 720K.)

If they are 1.44 MB floppies, a USB floppy drive will be physically able to read them but you may encounter the HFS fileysystem support issue. It might be time to back up the contents of those floppies onto hard drives, with the aid of the old Macs, while you can.

I noticed that lack of under 1 MB support immediately with the USB floppy drives back when they were commonplace in 1999. I never knew why. By now, many of those floppies sadly are not readable anymore. Someone in 2018 brought 20 1.4 MB floppies to me that had never been read in over 20 years. Only 2 were legible.

I recently purchased a "Nice2MiTu 3.5" USB External Floppy Disk Drive Portable 1.44 MB FDD USB " off of Amazon.

I plugged the floppy drive into my Windows 10 computer and brought up a terminal and typed:

Format A: /T:80 /N:9

I then plugged the drive into my Mac running Sonoma and it reads and writes to the drive without an issues.

If you can get the files on Monterey, on a hard drive, the sooner you do, the better. Floppies that are usable at this stage are on their last legs. I had to once rescue a Church's old data files three years ago that were on floppy, and only 10% of the floppies had any usable data.

If they are formatted for a Mac, then they’re most likely HFS, and Ventura does not read HFS only HFS plus

TM backups will be HFS+ or APFS