Want to view and/or destroy 50+ old 3.5 inch disks - how best to do it?
Hi, i finally have time to get organized and have a lot of old floppies that I will probably want to wipe and recycle, or destroy if I can’t recycle safely. There may be a few files on some that I want to save, eg, photos, so I would like to view some before wiping.
What is the most efficient way to do this? I saw drives on Amazon, though consumers disagreed with the seller as to whether they were Mac compatible. My Mac (late 2020 with current OS) has USB 3 ports and I have dongles for basic USBs but there is some question about whether these will work.
Advice? Thanks.
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Any of the usb floppy drives that claim Mac support should work fine. And at $20-$40 there's not too much risk involved (in case you get completely ripped off by some fake company). I'd buy retail (I hate Amazon, but that's just me). Walmart seems to have a decent collection of drives.
I'd stay away from "USB 2.0" drives for this. You're paying for more "speed" but the speed is going to be limited by the floppy anyway. You'd be paying extra for no good reason. USB 1.0 is enough for this.
To destroy them afterwards ... you can use the Mac to quickly erase them (just deleting the file system info), or to write zeros to every block (in case you're worried about someone recovering the data). Or you could use a degausser (or strong magnet). Or pry off the floppy gate with a screwdriver and take some shears to cutting the floppy. Hmm, looking at it ... just take something sharp and slide open the gate and cut the disk. Once it's damaged like that nothing normal will ever read it again.
The real question is what kind of brew to consume while wading through 50 disks worth of files. It's going to take a while to review 
