There are downsides to this, specifically a downside when you start interpreting data and restructuring it in a lossy manner. There are no special formatting needs, and no buttons to push. Meaning lots of convenience, that files appear and can be read from your USB stick as if it really were a floppy disk, that you can just stick it in Windows, drag and drop, and then move the USB stick to your CNC machine or whatever, and it sees the recently added files as if they were on a floppy disk all along. Or basically, the USB Floppy has the ability to extract DOS files from the “raw magnetic data” that the host system feeds it, and then copy these extracted DOS files to a FAT16-based (or FAT32) USB storage device, and vice-versa. This is what our standard USB Floppy unit does for convenience of the users, not only does it interpret the raw analog magnetic tracks, but it also interprets the most common low-level format (the division of circular tracks into packets, each holding X amount of data) and it also interprets the FAT12 filing system that Microsoft DOS made so popular. The result is that, to represent a standard high density 2 megabyte floppy disk, you may have to use alot more than 2 megabytes unless you start interpreting the data and storing what you think is important, and in a more convenient and compact form… meaning you discard and lose original data (in this case, time domain data) in the process, saying that you can reconstruct it “good enough”.

In short, floppy disks not only hold the digital data but time domain data as well. In this case, the magnetic platter of the floppy disk is only used to store digital data the 1’s and 0’s are easy to convert, but the time stamp and duration of each bit can vary infinitely on the continuous analog track. An example would be an uncompressed recording of a song it quickly gets into the tens and hundreds of megabytes, even though one song is only minutes long. In reality the floppy disk is an analog device that is used to store digital data in any situation involving analog recordings, the data size can quickly get out of hand depending on how perfect you want to reproduce it. The USB Floppy product sold by PLR Electronics is a floppy disk drive emulator emulator meaning it tries to act the same way as a normal floppy disk drive would act, but it is not a 100% perfect emulation because a USB stick is not exactly like a floppy disk.

Review of the floppy disk as a storage medium, and the USB replacement USB Floppy Disk Drive Emulator Technical documentation, Troubleshooting, and Configuration

Usb floppy emulator program