Floppy Disk Reader, 3.5 inch 1.44mb External USB Type A/C Floppy Disk Drive for PC, Laptop and Desktop Compatible with Windows 11/10/8/7/2000/XP, Not Compatible With Mac and Chrome, Black

Works as intended. I was able to recover most of my wife's 20 year old floppies. She has been looking for a couple of old pictures she thought were lost in one of her many movings before we met. Easy to use and no problems connecting it to my Windows 11 PC.

I got two of these to create old style dos and Atari games with. I have a ton of 3.5” floppies and this brings back the good ol days of saving on disks. Runs on win 11 just fine. Also comes up as drive a: just like on older computers. If you add a second it becomes b:. If you run discos you can use these with old games written for dos. Great product!

We needed this reader because we had some pictures that were on some 3.5 disks and we no longer had a computer with a reader. This one worked great and was affordable. The reason for the 4 star is the reader is kind of noisy

I was skeptical but works great on my Windows 11 Pro desktop. Hadn't heard the sound of a floppy disk reading since probably the late 90's/early 2000's but was able to read most of the disks I had sitting in my basement.

I wanted something simple: plug in a floppy drive, read more than one disk, and rescue old files. The Chuanganzhuo CAZED-006 looked promising at a budget price, but in real use it proved fundamentally unreliable and nearly useless. Right out of the box the unit did spin up and show the first disk just fine — that was the only time it worked. After swapping to a second disk (even a perfectly good one), the reader would stubbornly cling to the first disk’s contents, refusing to refresh or recognize new data. The drive effectively becomes a single-disk read-only device, even if you eject the disk and insert another. That’s not a minor annoyance — it defeats the entire purpose of having a floppy reader. This problem persisted across multiple systems I tried, including a completely different PC setup. It wasn’t an isolated USB port or driver issue — the hardware itself just refused to read beyond the first disk. Nothing short of miraculous happened when switching computers. Some product literature suggests you can “refresh” or force a re-read by unplugging the unit and reconnecting it, and some user manuals even coach you on how to manually refresh the drive in File Explorer to see new disk data. In practice, those so-called workarounds are half measures at best — they don’t consistently fix the core problem of switching disks, and they feel like excuses for a design that doesn’t work the way it should. Digging around online, you’ll see mixed signals. On marketplaces there are a handful of positive ratings suggesting the drive works on Windows 10 or handles a batch of floppy disks without issue. But there’s also at least one outright negative review where someone says it “does not work and does not meet the specifications in the description.” That’s exactly the experience I had — anything beyond a single floppy becomes a gamble. To be clear — this is a simple peripheral, not rocket science. A floppy reader shouldn’t need driver hacks or manual refresh tricks just to load a second disk. The fact that this one behaves that way suggests either cheap parts, poor firmware, or sloppy integration between the mechanical reader and the host system. Bottom line: if you need to consistently read a collection of floppy disks and actually retrieve data, this Chuanganzhuo CAZED-006 is not the tool for the job. It functions sporadically at best, and it’s downright useless for everyday legacy data transfer. I’d skip it entirely and look for a more reliable USB floppy solution that doesn’t require so much technical wrangling just to read a second disk.

Works great and easy to connect.

I have large collection of old 3.5" Disks going all the way back to my MS-DOS days in College. I bought this FDD to archive my data because at some point in the future it will just get more difficult. The first time I plugged this drive into my Windows 10 PC, stuck in an old data disk, I got the A:\ is not accessible, just like the many reviews before mine. However reading through the reviews I came across one that stated it worked with Linux but not their PC. Out came the old 2011 Mac Book Pro (High Sierra), guess what, it worked, and it was able to read the same dos data disk that Windows 10 had a hard time with. That got me thinking, is there an issue with the drive, a driver issue, or maybe something else. Time to work through some elimination and narrow down the issue. First, lets test this drive on multiple Windows 10 pc and see if this problem follows. Sure enough, it was not accessible with a Surface Pro, HP Envy Laptop, or my company workstation all running Windows 10. Back to my main Windows 10 PC, grabbed another old disk, again not accessible by the drive, and lets format it! Sure enough after formatting this disk, it was readable. Copied a small txt file to it and it was readable on the MacBook, Surface Pro, HP Envy, and my company PC. Is this an issue with the Windows 10 driver reading old disks or is it an issue with the disk? Out came the disk collection, I went through the stack and started with my OEM Microsoft disk and the newer ones were readable (Windows 98, 95 & 3.11, and MSDOS 6.22) however the older ones (MS-DOS 3.3, Windows 3.0) were not accessible in Windows 10, but all could be accessed with the MacBook. This looks like a disk format issue and the Windows 10 driver. So reading through the the little Trouble Shooting guide that came with the FDD, sure enough on page 5 is the answer. "this problem occurs on disks that do not contain a media descriptor byte in the BIOS parameter block (BPB) of the boot sector. Some older preformatted floppy disks do not contain a media descriptor byte". Bingo - it's the Windows 10 driver needing this media descriptor byte which some older disk don't have. If you have an old floppy disk with known data on it that gives you the "A:\ is not accessible", odds are the disk and/or the FDD is not bad, it's an old disk missing the media descriptor byte on the boot section most likely preformatted before the MSDOS 6.0 era. I was able to backtrack a possible solution from Microsoft using Dskprobe.exe to modify the boot sector. However it looks like the last time it was included with Windows was back on XP. I don't have the hardware available, but I am interested if this issue is limited to Windows 10 or if there's an older version of Windows (8, Vista, 7, XP, 98) that would be able to read a disk without the media descriptor. Hope this helps anyone that runs into the same.

I initially thought this device was junk, but after reading a bit about it, I think my issues are with trying to read 25 year old floppy disks on a modern W10 system. It just doesn’t work. I should have tested it right away. I've tried a number of disks - it won't read any of them. Returns "disk may not be formatted," which I know isn't the case. Don’t think it’s a problem with the device itself, only with what I’m asking it to do. Unfortunately, I'm well outside of the return window.

Very poor products

Works great on win 10 -11. **WILL NOT READ 720K FLOPPIES!** Good build quality.

I have been able to retrieve my old files from floppy's. Once I finish, I can chuck out all the old floppy's

worked for me had 6 floppy discs from 1996 that i needed the files off of, plug & play, no issues and transferred my files.

On occasions the Desk Top displays a message that the item was dismounted incorrectly even though no action was taken to disconnect the drive. A reconnection then takes place. This is disturbing. Ce rain discs take long to display its data even though there is just one file.