If you have two (or more) identically configured floppy drives connected to the same floppy drive controller, commands to format a disk should be executed by all the drives at once. When it comes to wiping/formatting your disks, there may be a method of doing these in bulk. These controller cards (which also include Super-IO cards and some SCSI adapters) only existed in ISA (and EISA) forms, which may or may not suit the computers you have available. PCs originally supported up to four floppy drives, which could be achieved by using two controller cards (with two drives each). HD-Copy for DOS works well too for more basic floppy reading requirements (DOS format only), but I can't remember if it can read from multiple drives simultaneously.Īs mentioned in other answers, reading from multiple floppy disks that share the same controller is unlikely to give much of a speed increase. Then all you need to do is find floppy-reading software that will allow you to use several floppy drives in parallel! You could use ImageDisk for archival-grade copying on a DOS system, but I think it only reads one floppy at a time. Alternatively, you could use an older PC: there are old ISA floppy controller boards that have jumpers allowing them to be reconfigured so that you can run two controllers in a single system, with up to four floppy drives. If you want to stick to modern PCs, your best bet is probably something like KryoFlux, Greaseweazle, or Flu圎ngine you can run several in parallel but it starts getting expensive fast (less so with Greaseweazle or Flu圎ngine). The second is that archiving floppies properly is relatively difficult, and is hard to do properly in parallel on standard systems. The first is that formatting floppies is always best done on the system they'll be used with, so that really solves your problem on that end of things: format your Amiga floppies in an actual Amiga, your Atari floppies in an actual Atari, your DOS floppies in an actual DOS PC. To actually answer your question, there are two things to consider. As suggested by Muzer, I'd recommend obtaining new-old-stock floppies to use instead of recycling existing ones, if they have content you care about (or are commercial floppies).
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