In this case, what would internal floppy drive mean? The last Macs with floppy drives (I think Old World G3s?) used a custom Apple controller, integrated into the chipset, with a bespoke 20-pin cable.
replyEven on the old world G3s, Mac OS X never had floppy drive support. There was a driver someone had ported from BSD you could install.
replyYes! And Zip Disk support. I have an app that has to detect different external media types and have a pile of old drives that work just fine.
replyUSB floppy drives indeed.
replyA USB floppy drive behaves almost identically to a USB hard drive-yet another SCSI block device. The cost of keeping support for them is minimal
replyThis is very different from legacy PC floppy drive controllers which spoke a completely different protocol, which was very complex and full of footguns
Legacy floppy controllers also had various legacy features almost nobody used, like soft deletion of sectors (IBM added this in the 70s for use with primitive database systems), or attaching tape drives using the floppy interface (nowadays if you buy a brand new tape drive, the interface options are SAS or Fibre Channel)