Relating to this, I had this Dell floppy drive (it is actually a rebadged NEC drive) that I found in a random box. It was new unopened. It was supposed to a accessory for a old Dell laptop (which had a drive bay which you could install a DVD drive, floppy drive, hard drive caddy, or extra battery). I still have that laptop but the hard drive is dead and I don’t have a IDE hard drive, and it doesn’t seem to allow booting without a working hard drive (won’t even go into boot device selection if I want to boot from a CD or USB drive). Ok back to the floppy drive. It has some connector which appears to be a proprietary IDE connector. But apparently it has a mini USB port as well, which I wondered what that would be for. I plugged the USB into a Windows 10 computer and sure enough, it detected it as a floppy drive. I inserted a floppy disk and it worked. This made me wonder what that USB port was really for, as this surely wasn’t meant to be used as an external floppy drive. I ejected it and put it back in as the clicking feeling felt good. And then it got stuck. So I decided to take it apart. I got it unstuck, but I decided to leave it open as I wanted to see the head move while writing random stuff with it. One day, I was messing around with it disassembling it further and then I couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. So I just left it in the closet.
Fast forward to today, a year later. I saw this thread so I took it out of my closet and took a picture of it. There’s dust on it now. Maybe I might spend the next weekend trying to reassemble it if I’m bored.