There’s nothing quite like the drive to build something just to see if you can. YouTuber polymatt set out to create a floppy disk drive, the favored storage medium of yesteryear, from scratch, because why not. For anyone born too late to have regularly used one, a floppy disk is a magnetically coated, flexible polyester disk encased in a protective shell. Insert it into a floppy drive, and a magnetic head reads or writes data on the disk. If you’ve ever wondered why the “save” icon looks the way it does, it’s based on the shape of a floppy disk.
To start, polymatt measured and recreated the disk enclosure and other pieces in Shapr3D and MakeraCAM, then cut the aluminum pieces on a Carvera Air CNC machine. The magnetic disk itself was made by laser-cutting a piece of PET film and coating it with a suspension of iron oxide powder. After assembling all the components and a few touch-and-go moments, he was actually able to magnetize the floppy disk and write to it, albeit at a very basic level.
We declared the floppy disk dead in 2010, and in the years since then even those that clung on the longest have abandoned it. The Japanese government finally said goodbye to the floppy disk in 2024, and the German Navy moved on from the format in the same year. The US government only just stopped using 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the launch of nukes in 2019.
Polymatt’s project was a wonderful dive into nostalgic tech and engineering prowess. Maybe next time he can make a compact disc from scratch.
