We are enjoying many conveniences brought by modernisation, like speed and huge storage capacities. But we humans love reminiscing about the time when gadgets were slow, produced poor resolution, and had meagre storage space, which is the complete opposite of now. But the good news is that your love for retro tech, specifically the floppy disk, need not be attached with slowness or puny storage capacity because there’s the Hagibis Floppy Disk Style SSD Enclosure.
Yes, it looks like a 3.5-inch floppy disk straight out of the 1990s. No, it absolutely does not behave like one. Instead of storing homework assignments and disappointment in 1.44 MB chunks, this thing houses an M.2 NVMe SSD and pushes data through a USB-C connection at up to 10 Gbps.
Inside, it supports compact 2230 and 2242 NVMe drives, which means you can turn what appears to be ancient storage media into a modern external SSD capable of roughly 1000–1200 MB/s transfer speeds. That is several thousand times faster than the floppy disk it is impersonating, which feels mildly disrespectful to history but extremely convenient for everyone else.
The enclosure is also slim enough to disappear into a pocket or hang off a bag, and it even works as external storage for recording ProRes video directly from compatible iPhones. In other words, the “floppy disk” has quietly become a production tool.
Powered by a 9210CN controller chip and built for plug-and-play use, it is basically nostalgia with a performance upgrade nobody in 1997 could have imagined.
So if you ever wanted to carry a floppy disk again without carrying its original problems along with it, this might be the safest way to do that. 💾
If you are down, the Hagibis Floppy Disk Style SSD Enclosure is available to buy from Amazon.com for US$27.99.
This is not the first time the good old floppy disk has been turned into something other than a slow, small storage medium. Someone once turned it into a power bank, too.
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Images: Hagibis.
