Hi Laura,
With regard to the floppies, it depends a bit on what kinds you’re dealing with, how many, and what your budget is. A Kryoflux controller equipped with 3.5” and a 5.25” flippy drive is the gold standard these days, but it has a couple of drawbacks: it’s a fairly expensive option and really should only be used by experienced technical staff (for example, if you turn on power to the controller and the drive in the wrong order, you can wreck your drive).
If you’re /not/ dealing with flippy disks (ie, 5.25” floppies intended by the manufacturer to be single sided, but which have data written on both sides regardless) or Mac 400K or 800K double density 3.5” floppies, you can probably get by with a 3.5” USB floppy drive and a Device Side Data FC5025 USB controller and refurbished 5.25” drive.
The Kryoflux has hardware-level write-blocking, and the FC5025 has no write capabilities. You’d need some kind of write blocker for the USB floppy drive, or write blocking to external media can be set in the Windows registry (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/registry-hack-to-disable-writing-to-usb-drives/) if you need a low-end option.
Best,
John
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