Engineer installs 3.5-inch floppy drive in a Tesla — modern EV recognizes and runs ancient storage device, even plays an MP3 file from diskette

A Ukrainian electronics engineer and software developer just installed a 3.5-inch floppy drive in their Tesla, and they were even able to play a single MP3 file off the ancient storage medium. Oleg Kutkov posted a video on X (expand the tweet below) showing the old drive plugged into the USB port in the glove compartment of the electric vehicle via a USB to FDD converter. They then played Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, which was stored on the 1.44 MB diskette. It took some time for the song to load, and you can hear the drive moving around the magnetic head to read the contents, but it works.

Despite Kutkov’s background with hardware and software, they did not have to make any major modifications or changes to either the drive or the car. They just plugged the drive into the vehicle, and it immediately recognized it as a storage drive. “It’s nice that the Linux kernel still supports this subsystem,” Kutkov said. “The system script mounts any detected disk drive (with some exceptions) as external storage for Sentry/Dashcam/media source.” However, another X user commented that the converter board presented the floppy disk as just another standard storage device, which is why it worked with no issues and changes.

Sony introduced the 3.5-inch floppy in 1981, with the removable storage hitting its peak in popularity in the 1990s. However, the arrival of rewritable CDs with 486 times more data storage than the 1.44 MB diskette, and USB flash drives in the 2000s meant the storage system was soon relegated to running on legacy machines and hardware. Today, the technology is already 45 years old, and many of the new generation would only recognize it as the “save” icon on many modern applications and not as an actual storage medium.

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Even older systems have started finally phasing out the floppy disk. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started phasing it out last year, alongside some of its computers that still used Windows 95, while the Japanese government has finally amended its laws that required the use of magnetic storage devices in 2024. We’re also seeing institutions finally upgrading from even older versions of this removable storage — San Francisco is spending $212 million to upgrade its metro trains and remove the 5.25-inch floppies installed on their systems by 2034, while the German Navy is looking to replace the 8-inch floppy drives used on its Brandenburg-class F123 frigates.

Unfortunately, there’s still one prominent holdout for the 3.5-inch floppy — the New Jersey State Prison. It does not allow prisoners to keep flash drives, but they’re entitled to 20 floppy disks. This means they’re limited to a total of less than 28.8 MB of digital space to handle their appeals and require a library computer to transfer the files their lawyers send them on USB drives to the allowed storage media.

While floppy disks are no longer a practical means of storing data, they’re still quite important for the retro community. Linux even received updated drivers last year to help keep the drives running for a few more years. Despite that, you can still buy new floppy disks at floppydisk.com, at least for a few more years.

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