What type of power connector does a floppy disk use?

Answer 1

It varies. There's no universally adopted external floppy disk drive standard, so it depends on the type of drive and/or computer you have.

Modern (2008) external floppy drives commonly use USB (Universal Serial Bus). This isn't really a "floppy drive connector"; it's just an ordinary USB connector. The drive unit itself contains the electronics to make the floppy drive work with USB computers.

The original IBM-PC line (circa 1981) included an external floppy drive option, which used a 37-pin D-shell sub-miniature connector. These weren't all that common to begin with, and are extremely rare these days.

The early Macintosh computers (circa 1984) included an external floppy drive port, which used a 19-pin D-shell sub-miniature connector.

SCSI floppy disk drives exist, but were always fairly rare.

Some manufacturers introduced external floppy drives with manufacturers-specific (non-standard) connectors. Generally, you had to use the manufacturer's expansion card and floppy drive together.

Some manufacturer external floppy connectors were mechanically compatible with the 25-pin D-shell sub-miniature parallel port connector. This allowed the same computer port to be used for either printer or floppy. However, parallel and floppy are not electrically compatible, so only a computer specifically designed for this would work. Dell used it in some of their laptops (Latitude C series, for example).

Answer 2

In personal computers, floppy drives only have two connections, the power connector and the data connector.

Generally, the power connector is the small 4-pin connector from the power supply. If such connectors don't exist, then an adapter can be plugged into one of the larger 4-pin peripheral power connectors, and the adapter can be plugged into the drive.

The floppy data cable is a ribbon cable and goes to the floppy header on the motherboard or peripheral adapter. It has less pins than the ATA/IDE connector. There is a twist in the cable to differentiate the two drive connectors from each other, and the connector with the twist is the first drive. The connectors are often keyed to prevent plugging them in wrong, but not all are keyed. There is usually a red strip to designate pin one. That was important before the connectors were keyed, since the red wire was used to make sure both ends were connected the same way.

Answer 3

An internal floppy disk drive (rarely used nowadays) uses a Molex connector. I have an external floppy drive (in case I need to search an old floppy) that uses a USB connection.

Answer 4

Usually USB.