YE-Data has released their YE-Data 2X USB Floppy Drive. It’s less than an inch thick, weighs less than 10 ounces, and has a suggested retail price of US$69.95.
“There is not much that can be done to increase the capacity of standard floppy disk drives and keep the backwards compatibility intact, but using technology from our high speed floppy diskette duplication drives, we have been able to create this new kind of 2X USB floppy disk drive,” said Daniel Blade Olson of Y-E DATA. “The drive spins twice as fast as a normal floppy disk drive so the reads and writes are much faster.”
YE-Data’s 2X USB floppy supports three modes of full read/write compatibility across the 2.0, 1.6, 1.0MB capacities. It works with Mac OS X (10.1 and higher) and the traditional Mac operating system (Mac OS 8.6 and higher).