I'm running CrossOver 12.0/Mini vMac 3 on an OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) Mac, and I'm still learning how to deal with physical floppy disks and disk images. Some of these points will, and others won't, apply to anyone running CrossOver for Linux, but what I've learned from hands-on experience and reading is that:
an external USB floppy drive is PnP, with no need to install drivers to use it with my mid-2010 Mac Mini,
recent versions of OS X can read from, but not write to, floppy disks (including DSHD 1.44 MB disks(, and
only older Apple hardware can write to old 800K (double-sided) and 400K (single-sided) floppy disks.*
*This is a hardware limitation that can't readily be overcome by software, nor is it about DOS and Mac formats: Floppy drives on IBM-compatible PCs used a constant speed, while older Apple floppy drives varied their speed to write more data to the longer outer tracks of a disk. That's why a double-sided disk for a Mac could hold 800K, but a disk formatted for DOS (even by a Mac) only held 720K. The morale of the story: Don't get rid of that old Mac hardware until you've archived the floppies' content as disk images.
Backward compatibility is often a one-way street, and although modern Macs will by default create a compressed image of a floppy disk, it may be unreadable by either a classic Mac or software that emulates a classic Mac. You may have to read files from a floppy disk, move them to the real or emulated classic Mac environment, then create disk images.
For Mini vMac, there are utilities designed for the transfer of files in and out of the virtual environment. (See Input and Output for specifics.) More generally, see http://macintoshgarden.org/installing-software-your-emulator for a discussion of issues involved.
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