Has anyone seen, heard of, or used a disk emulator to convert a 3.5" drive to a USB port? For example, I might like to substitute/replace the drive on an older arranger module to accept USB sticks. I've seen some emulators that claim to work, but do they? Any help out there?

I installed one on my Yamaha psr 1000 about 5 years ago, works great!
There are videos on you tube on this. I was going to put one on my old korg i5 s but the cable connectors are not pc like Yamaha which is 30 pins. You should get software to partition the USB drive into 99 1.44 mb sections with the emulator drive. Each one is like a floppy except all on one USB flash drive. No problems with it thru all the years I've had it. Make sure it's compatible for what ever model keyboard you are going to install it in.

Hi,
So is it a case of unplugging the old floppy drive and plugging the new one in.

My floppy drive in my 12 year old clavinova no longer appears to work, could be far more difficult to get at than a keyboard, I would imagine.

The saddest part for me is , I have a heap of Yamaha song ( pre date midifile) disks and books which only work in the clavinova , some of the old Yamaha keyboards and the Dom 30 module. Doubt whether they work with the 1.44 floppy drive either, but even so be nice to have some sort of storage function onboard.

Kind of wish I hadn't sold the last keyboard I had , that actually played these songs haha

Had no idea something like this existed.

Rikki
My wife has a Clavinova about the same vintage. It works fine, but the keys have an annoying thumping sound, which must be the pads. Does yours have this problem?

Sorry for hijacking the thread.

I think you can still get floppy disk drives, assuming that Yamaha are using a standard floppy format. If you can read the floppy on a PC or a Mac that suggests a standard unit, then it depends whether the Yamaha item uses a custom or standard connector.

I had to replace the floppy on my old Ensoniq SD1. Standard connector, non-standard format. I had to get a very customisable TEAC drive (with a matrix of configuration pins) and fiddle until it worked.

And the excessive thumping of the keybed is usually to do with the strip that the keys hit at the end of the travel getting worn. There's a youtube video about it. I think you can get the strip off Yamaha.

Thank you John,
It sort have hasn't been a priority, just when this post popped up, made me think it would be good to have onboard storage.
Did a bit of research on my song collection, there is something strange about the way the disks are formatted , they aren't recognised by a PC . May have to forget about them..

Hi Bernie,
apart from the faulty floppy drive, mine still appears to be working ok.
Probably hasn't been played as much as your wife's .
Sad part is losing access to all my Disk Orchestra disks and music books.
They had wonderful arrangements..
I have an old Yamaha mdf3 which can read and play the disks, but it doesn't send out correct program changes to the piano.

Thanks, folks. This sounds promising.0

Hi Cassp
I was having a look thru eBay, I noticed some were 720k some 1.44 .
Some mentioned suitable for Yamaha, others mentioned Korg, Yamaha, etc
Others didn't mention any keyboards at all.

What sort of floppy disks do you use are they 720k or 1.4 mb, it can make a difference. There's an extra hole in 1.4m discs. This website explains and might be able to source a compatible disk drive: http://www.floppydisk.com/drives

What model number is the piano?