I mentioned in a previous review of a good, solid floppy disk drive that my place of work still requires the use of floppy disks and with modern computers now not having the required drives it means we have to rely on these. This was the first model we tried along with the previously reviewed model and sadly we had nothing but negative experiences with this Lindy device. Lindy and built a name for themselves in recent years by delivering good, affordable and competitive devices to the market. But sadly this wasn't one of them.

All initial sign were good, the price of £49.99 was good, and part of the reason I invested in this and removing it from the box it felt like a sturdy, well made piece of kit. It certainly looked the part, had a decent length cable and a strong USB connector. All was well.

Indeed even after loading the device up for the first time into the computer things were fine, the USB cable connected and within seconds the port was connected. As with most of these devices there really is no need for installation, it reads as a normal USB device. But here in the trouble started.

Even though the device connects massive problems began with reading disks. Even at its fastest the disk read speed was incredibly slow. The device was noisy, slow and sometimes even cut off during reading and saving. This is totally unacceptable considering that other devices have used the same disks on the same systems and worked fast and well.

Each test we loaded from disk took a lifetime to bring and half the time the device was not even recognised. It was a mere fact of it not recognising that there was a disk in the drive or saying the disk was faulty or required formatted....bare in mind these were the same disks which worked on other systems perfectly fine.

The worst issues came when saving. Not only did it take ages but it was unreliable. The saving would take an age, then you had to wait an age to be able to unplug the device and unplug it too soon and data was lost and corrupted. Not very time efficient compared to other brands.

Also I have issues with the disks becoming faulty, corrupt, loosing data....total nightmare.

This is a poor device all around with serious reliability issues and I would not recommend it at all!

Also on CIAO