Floppy disk drive

Besides support for USB, you'll also need:

CONFIG_SCSI
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE

The floppy registers as a USB ``Mass Storage'' (yeah, right) device. If you load the right modules, plug it in and put a floppy in it, you can mount it as /dev/sda. You can have your system to do this automatically, without running commands as root, by using usbmgr. It polls the USB bus for status changes and loads the required modules on demand. In Debian, the package you need has the same name...

I compared its speed agains a normal floppy disk by using the following command:

time dd if=/dev/sda,fd0 of=/dev/null

and got about 41 secs on a normal floppy drive, and about 10 secs more on this one. Pretty good.