The End of a Floppy Era

An anonymous reader writes This article is an editorial on the end of the floppy and the rise of more portable, more efficient data storage." Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!

Something smells fishy

[Ignorant Aardvark]

This article was entered as part of an article-writing contest [flexbeta.net] with real life rewards such as a video card or DVD writers. This article is just written by some guy trying to win a contest, not by anyone influential. What he says is true, but obvious.

Re:New Format

[toady]

They call it CD-ROM [slashdot.org]

Re:New Format

[Gaima]

CD
USB
Floppy for all those millions of machines still out there with floppy drives, and all the millions still to be made with floppies.

Re:New Format

[faloi]

Easy, set up your USB key to be DOS bootable and do it that way. Next question?

floppies ARE still useful

[robertlankford]

I found this out recently when I had to scrounge through old computer junk for a floppy drive. Yep, even in 2005, you can't set up XP on my brand new computer (3 months ago now) equipped with only a SATA hard disk in it. Sheesh.

Re:long live my USB memory stick

[Skater]

Believe it or not, the USB ports on the front of my work PC are even worse: Dell chose to angle them. They're beneath a plastic cover, but they aren't perpendicular to the front of the PC - the ports actually face down at an angle and are difficult to use unless I lay on the floor and look up. (Optiplex GX270.)

Re:Not gone...

[NetNifty]

I've got a floppy drive on this machine, and the only reason for that is Windows requires SATA drivers to be given to it on a floppy disk during install. If MS let me use a CD or even a USB pen drive for that it wouldn't be necessary (it even asked for a floppy in the A: drive when no floppy drive was connected).

Re:Not gone...

[NetNifty]

OK then I've just found this [msfn.org] which sounds like it should solve the problem of requiring a floppy drive. Hope someone else finds it useful too.

Re:Not gone...

[eosp]

Write OSes. Well you can do that with a thumb drive too but it's painful and difficult. I still have the scars.

Re:New Format

[Slayk]

XP stll requires a floppy drive for SATA.

How to fit more on a floppy

[Ed Avis]

The article claims that a 3.5inch floppy holds only 1.44 megabytes of data. That's true only if you format them in the standard MS-DOS format (and we'll ignore the rather weird definition of 'megabyte' used to quote the size). But the physical limit of the diskette is two megabytes - that's why they are sometimes called '2MB (Unformatted)' - and with better software you can get closer to this.

You can increase the number of tracks (concentric circles) on the disk, or the number of sectors per track (reducing the gap between each sector). Floppy drives are rated for 80 tracks but can usually manage a few more. There is the 1.72 megabyte or so format used by Microsoft for installation floppies, which is readable by standard DOS and Windows with no problems. Although DOS supports it, the 'format' program doesn't, so you will need to get fdformat or 2MDOS (see below).

A step further is to install a driver like 2M (search for it on Simtel's MS-DOS archive) which lets you format floppies up to 1.92 megs or so. I think some of these formats are understood by Linux but I'm not sure. Sadly, since 2M is a DOS driver it won't work with newer Windows versions. The included 2MDOS driver patches MS-DOS's format program to let you format floppies in 1.72 megs and other reasonably-large sizes, which are then readable by all DOS and Windows versions without the need for extra drivers.

2M also includes 2MGUI, short for '2M-Guiness', which claims to hold the world record for fitting the most onto a floppy. It will format ordinary quad-density floppies nearly two megabytes. (Bizarrely, it also manages to get about 1.1 megs on a double-density floppy, which is more than the theoretical limit.)

Note also that later model IBM PS/2s included an octuple-density floppy drive, giving 2.88 megs with vanilla DOS or OS/2 and nearly 4 megs with clever format programs, but this more expensive hardware never caught on. Perhaps the floppy controller in your clone PC nowadays can handle an octuple-density disk drive, I'm not sure.

Re:Better yet, when will Windows be USB bootable?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use BartPE on a USB thumbdrive as long as your BIOS supports booting from it.

In other, related news, my BIOS sucks.

Re:Keep the floppy

[bhtooefr]

OK, I'll throw in stuff from the PC world...

*On XP, they can be removed without an unmount procedure. 2000 will bitch at you about it, but it'll still work.
*Autorunning stuff? If you don't put an autorun.inf in there, UFDs won't either (unless it's XP, in which case it'll bring up something asking whether you want to look at pics on there, copy it to CD, listen/watch media, open the folder, or do nothing).
*With a driver, they work with 98(SE) as well.
*They're bootable on most systems from 2003 on, and some from 2000 on.
*DOS support? Hmm... I think there are USB mass storage [theinquirer.net] drivers for DOS...

Re:New Format

[oolon]

Actually CDs can boot in two ways, the way you describe is a floppy emulation mode, this is used by linux boot disks. However they can boot in a full disk mode, this is used by all windows install disks. Interestingly some IDE host devices like the Promise Ultra 133TX2 don't support the emulation mode. For more info look at http://www.promise.com/support/faq/faq2_eng.asp?pr oduct_id=87# [promise.com] and select the 3 option on the faq.

James

floppy was dead in 1998 - iMac

[zachmagaw]

the original iMac was considered revolutionary when it didnt include a floppy drive - quoting business week interview of Steve Jobs from May 25, 1998. Floppy has been dead since 1998. "Q: Why did you decide against including an internal floppy drive and opt for a slower modem? A: You know, you've got to do the right thing. Just take the floppy: People aren't thinking clearly. Nobody's going to back up a 4-gigabyte drive onto 1-megabyte floppies. They'll use a Zip drive -- but they're too expensive to build into a consumer product. Besides, hardly anybody backs up anyway, so why build cost into every system? The second reason for a floppy is software distribution, but a lot of software now comes on CD-ROMs because it's better and cheaper [the iMac includes a CD-ROM drive]. "

Re:New Format

[Criffer]

Obviously someone who is quite unaware of how much a BIOS actually does, and how much DOS relies on it. Every single operation a DOS machine can to do the hardware is done through the BIOS. That includes - guess what - flashing it!

Only in these days of everyone needing their own drivers for every bit of hardware have people forgotten the utility of the BIOS.

DOS may be in memory, but the BIOS calls execute from CMOS. That includes those calls which make USB drives appear as floppies to brain-dead old DOS. And DOS from a floppy is still the safest way to flash a BIOS.

Re:Still need floppies to flash your BIOS

[Solosoft]

Not if you own an ASUS motherboard. All 3 of my Asus Motherboards can be flashed in windows with there handy "ASUS Update" Utility. It goes on the internet and finds the newest bios for your motherboard and from a click of a button backs it up and installs the new one. I don't know how "smart" it is to do from windows but worked fine for me on my Asus PII 350MHz and my Athlon 64 system.

The days of floppys are slowly deminishing. Heck I can boot my system off a USB Thumbdrive or a flashcard (connected through my printers flash card reader) if I wanted too. The only systems with floppy drive is my Pentium Pro [solosoft.org] and the floppy doesn't even work. I was looking at my pictures and noticed I still have the floppy cleaning thingy [solosoft.org] in it from like 2000.

Oh and out of my 50 some disks I bet you about 10 actually work.

Re:Not gone...

[Dogtanian]

I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.

True; although ironically, the present cheapness of floppy drives and disks have probably contributed to lack of quality, and driven the perception of the floppy further into the ground than would have happened otherwise.

This is beside the point; the floppy's time has been and gone. Which raises a couple of issues with the article:-

(1) The guy is positively relishing the end of floppy disks. Yeah, they're slow, and really too small to be useful for anything except emergency boot disks nowadays. But I remember getting an Atari 800XL with 5.25" drive in the mid-80s (not state-of-the-art, even then) and believe me, when the alternative was program storage on audio cassette (as was the norm for the UK 8-bit market), a floppy drive was pretty damn desirable. Particularly when you consider that Atari games took from 5-25 minutes to load from cassette. *I* didn't hate floppies back then.

(2) It's notable that he doesn't mention the "next-generation" disk drives such as the Iomega Zip and LS-120/Superdisk... the 3.5" floppy comes out bad because it's been around *forever* (original release circa 1982, with the 1.44Mb HD released roughly *twenty years ago*!!). It's not as if the 3.5" was the only potential successor to the 5.25", it just happened to be the one adopted as standard. There were many potential successors to the 3.5", but they didn't become widely adopted enough (not even the relatively popular Zip) to become "transparently" standard.

So, the question is, is he criticising floppies, or just having a go at the 3.5" format? In fact, what was the point of the article at all- that the 1.44Mb floppy is dying? That's not news, we've heard it before, and it's too widespread to die suddenly, although USB drives will hasten its demise.

It's like audio cassettes... I didn't just "stop" using them one day. It just dawned on me that I had no real need for them any more, that I wasn't likely to record any new ones, and that it made more sense to transfer any remaining "commitment" to other formats. They're not woefully obsolete, I don't hate them, I just don't have a real use for them any more.

Re:Not gone...

[swv3752]

A while back I wanted to check the integrity of a hard drive and realized that the hard drive utilities were on floppy. I have long since abandoned the floppy drive in my long upgraded machine. So I searched around for a bootable cd image that had such utils and found this [ultimatebootcd.com]. If you ever need one of those floppy utils, most likely they will be found on the Ultimate boot CD.

Re:Back around 1981

[corngrower]

I don't ever recall 10" floppy drives. They probably were 8" drives. Even by the mid 1980's 8" drives were getting rare. 5 1/4" had larger capacity, and were smaller and more reliable by then.

Flash my BIOS

[Bruzer]

I built a computer this year and because I read on slashdot that floppies are dead I didn't buy one.

My computer worked fine, until I wanted to flash my BIOS. The only way my motherboard could be flashed was by creating a boot disk with thier custom exe file.

I had to buy a $10 floppy drive to flash my BIOS.

I still need them.

Re:Not gone...

[sundru]

Obviously you never had a machine with unrecognized/new SATA or SCSI controller chips, I believe the only way to load drivers for these is thru Floppies (Windows only) , Linux works happily :)

I think what you're looking for is this:

[Mitchell Mebane]

I know these have saved me a hell of a lot of time and trouble.

Bâshrat the Sneaky's Driver Packs [nyud.net]

Oh, and don't forget this:

RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack [nyud.net] (A new version is supposed to be out this Friday.)

Windows Drivers

[WD_40]

When I built my last computer I decided to forgo the floppy drive, however when I went to load my RAID drivers during Win2K setup, I discovered that Microsoft, in it's infinite wisdom, will only take RAID or SCSI drivers off a floppy. There is no option to browse any other media.

In any case, I hooked up a floppy during setup and then tossed it in the closet when I was done.

I certainly hope that in future versions of windows we won't be forced to use obsolete media.

Re:I realise I couldn't remember if I had a drive

[drakaan]

until then the floppy is very far from dead, just like the rs232 port.

<offtopic>Actually, that's now called an EIA232 [camiresearch.com] port, since it's no longer just a recommended standard. Changed in 1991, but since it had been "RS-232" for about 30 years at that point, nobody paid much attention.</offtopic>

Link to this poster and others

[aws910]

Are these ones like the one you saw?

http://iase.disa.mil/iaposters/ [disa.mil]

btw, some of the print-quality files are enormous, so keep browsing limited to the pdf versions to avoid (rapid) slashdotting. Maybe a kind soul can post a torrent of all of them if too many people hit it?